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Dissenting Opinion of the Official Opposition for
the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(e), The Official Opposition Members of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration have the honour to present their Dissenting Opinion as an addendum to:

FIRST REPORT - IMMIGRATION DETENTION AND REMOVAL

It is the opinion of the Official Opposition that the Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration is not representative of the opinions and recommendations of the entire Committee. Herein is a dissenting opinion reflecting our concerns.

The Report of the Legislative Advisory Group (LRAG) entitled Not just Numbers emphasizes an erosion of public confidence in Canada's immigration system. The Official Opposition is dedicated to restoring that confidence through substantive change in the administration of both the Department of Citizenship and Immigration and its agency, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB).

The Official Opposition feels that the LRAG recommendations concerning provisional status, electronic monitoring and the replacement of the IRB with accountable governmental officials would help to implement such changes.

Unlike the Committee Report, which did not adopt provisional status or electronic monitoring and failed to even consider substantive changes to the IRB, the Official Opposition concurs with LRAG in these concepts. Without these components, which we judge to be vital in solving our immigration crisis, the Committee Report is inconclusive. It addresses some of the symptoms, but only offers bandaid solutions to Canada's immigration problems, when a cure is required and attainable, if the political will exists.

The Official Opposition feels that the Committee lost sight of the intention of this responsibility somewhere in its procedural exercise. It became more preoccupied with protecting the integrity of the Minister and her bureaucracy than it was in recognizing the dire state of our immigration system and those individuals whose lives are left in limbo as a result of their inaction.

The Official Opposition holds a fundamentally different view on the IRB than the Government. Therefore, in those instances where the Committee Report refers to the IRB, we would replace the patronage-ridden and -driven, unaccountable agency with well-trained immigration officers accountable to Parliament and Canadians.

Further, the Official Opposition would prefer to see more of an emphasis placed on judicial background in consideration of these officials, which would aide in their independence and the legitimacy of their life-altering decisions. It is essential that merit rather than patronage form the genesis of this critical function.

The Official Opposition applauds the work of the Committee in realizing the importance and necessity of interdiction abroad, which will help to prevent people who will be inadmissible to Canada from arriving here in the first place. However, similar efforts are required in Canada to solve the immigration and refugee backlog of 35,000 cases and alleviate the associated problems with removals.

It is the feeling of the Official Opposition that every person in Canada legally should have some status. The Committee seems to be caught up in the semantics of provisional status, choosing only to focus on the aspect of the recommendation regarding detention. The Report states:

We need not deal in any length with provisional status, because, in our view, it is an unnecessary concept if the consequence of violating the status - mandatory detention - is itself rejected. [emphasis in original]

The Official Opposition does not feel that this point should have arrested consideration of provisional status in its entirety. The current system based on the notion of voluntary compliance with removal orders is ineffective. Compliance and enforcement are issues which could have been considered in the interest of restoring the integrity of the system through concrete changes. The Official Opposition feels that introducing a system where every individual in Canada would have some status would be a step in the right direction, and that the concept of provisional status, even if by some other name, would accomplish this.

The Committee concludes that, "our main problems in the enforcement area relate to removals, not to detention. Moreover, we have no desire to support recommendations that would make detention an issue where it is not now."

The Report goes on to clarify that by removals problem, the Committee means that,

Canada has a difficult time removing in a timely manner people with no legal right to be here. This, in turn, has affected the Canadian public's confidence in immigration enforcement activities. The challenge is to identify and analyze the various factors that contribute to those difficulties, and assist in their solution.

The Official Opposition feels that detention is an issue in this area, contrary to the Committee's ability to acknowledge this fact. We are speaking specifically of individuals who are ordered deported for criminal reasons; these individuals should be detained until such time that they are removed from Canada. To reiterate the Committee's statement, this is indeed a removals problem. The Official Opposition does not believe that detention is a means to an end, but in this particular circumstance, part of a solution.

The Committee Report states that, "dated technology makes it difficult to track people through the enforcement process and cannot generate needed data." The Report lists this as one of five major impediments to removals, yet the Committee would not even consider a recommendation involving electronic monitoring as an alternative to detention.

However, the Committee does recommend that, in lieu of detention, conditional release be considered without even defining the terms or consequences of such actions. The Official Opposition recommends that the Department of Citizenship and Immigration undertake a feasibility study of electronic monitoring as a component of conditional release. We feel that some sort of tracking would be of benefit to the liberty of the individual as an alternative to detention, and would help to restore integrity and accountability to the removals process and the immigration system as a whole.

In conclusion, the Standing Committee's deliberations of Not Just Numbers could have been more effective in offering recommendations for legislative change in the areas of detention and removals. In hindsight, some debate of these recommendations by the Committee prior to the calling of witnesses would have been more beneficial to the process as a whole. We make this point because some of these issues, especially the introduction of provisional status and an electronic monitoring system, were dismissed as controversial during deliberation. Had such debates occurred prior to the appearance of witnesses, such issues might have been addressed by witnesses called to offer testimony.

It is these areas of controversy which were not adopted by the majority of the Committee, and it is due to their exclusion, as well as the failure to even address the overhaul required at the IRB, that this Dissenting Opinion by the Official Opposition is necessary.

The Official Opposition is committed to representing grassroots Canadians and to restoring their faith in an immigration system that works for them. For this to occur, the Government must recognize and remedy the widespread problems as outlined in Not Just Numbers, the Report by the Legislative Review Advisory Group. We feel that our recommendations regarding electronic monitoring, provisional status and the Immigration and Refugee Board provide the Minister with a more representative opinion of the Standing Committee of Citizenship and Immigration, relating to matters of detention and removal. We look forward to the Minister's response in a timely fashion.