System of ‘second-class permanent residents’ developing, says lawyer

Supreme Court refuses to hear refugee case

The Supreme Court of Canada will not hear the case of a Sri Lankan refugee who risks being removed from Canada after returning to visit his home country in 2012.

Nisreen Ahamed Mohamed Nilam, a permanent resident living in Vancouver, has been fighting to have the federal government process his citizenship application, which is suspended pending a decision about whether to strip him of his refugee and permanent resident status.

His lawyer, Douglas Cannon, said his client, and hundreds of other refugees in similar situations, “now have to accept that they’re lower-quality permanent residents” than other immigrants, who can return to their home countries without fear of being removed from Canada.

As is its usual practice, the Supreme Court did not give reasons for its decision to deny leave to appeal.

The issue stems from a change to Canada’s so-called cessation rules, which allow the government to remove refugee status from people deemed to no longer need it, including those who have returned to visit their country of origin.

The Harper government expanded the rules in 2012, so that refugees can now be stripped of their permanent resident status as well as their refugee status. Thenimmigration minister Jason Kenney said the move would help the government cut down on fraudulent refugee claims.

The change means refugees who’ve lived in Canada for years could be removed from the country if they ever go home.

Nilam first came to Canada in 2008 as a refugee from the Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in 2009. He became a permanent resident in 2011, but travelled back to his home country for two lengthy visits in 2011 and 2012, and got married during the second trip. Under the old rules still in place in 2011, he could have lost his refugee status, but as he was already a permanent resident, that would have had little impact.

The rule change came into effect during his second visit to Sri Lanka. After Nilam returned to Canada in May 2013, the government launched a cessation case against him.

The application was initially dismissed, but the government appealed the decision, and Nilam is now waiting for a new cessation hearing.

In the meantime, he applied for Canadian citizenship, but eventually learned his citizenship application had been suspended pending the outcome of his cessation case. Last year, he went to Federal Court to ask that his citizenship application be processed, as he met all the criteria. The judge sided with him, but the decision was later overturned on appeal, with the appeal court judges ruling the immigration minister can suspend citizenship applications in these circumstances. The Supreme Court has now refused to hear the case.

Cannon said there are at least 393 other refugees in similar situations, with citizenship applications on hold due to cessation proceedings. He doesn’t believe the government intended for long-time permanent residents to be affected this way when the rules were changed in 2012.

“Even though you are given the title permanent resident, you’re not really a permanent resident. … They are now second-class permanent residents,” he said. “Mr. Nilam is a law-abiding refugee. He’s done everything that he is supposed to do. He hasn’t violated any laws whatsoever.”

Complicating matters, Cannon said, is that the Immigration and Refugee Board is scheduling very few cessation hearings, because it’s overwhelmed with new refugee hearings that take priority. That means people like Nilam are left waiting, often for years.

“The government’s looking at a massive backlog right now. And it’s a backlog of their own creation and it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

Toronto immigration lawyer Shelley Levine said these refugees are stuck in a “catch-22” — unable to proceed with citizenship applications until their cessation cases are resolved, but without any sense of when that might happen.

“That leaves a person in limbo,” he said. “And they have a black cloud over their head.”

One of Levine’s clients, a Nigerian refugee who moved to Canada in 1990, said he doesn’t understand why this is happening.

“It doesn’t add up,” he said. “It’s frustrating. It’s really frustrating.”

The man, who spoke with the Post on condition of anonymity out of concern for his livelihood and his family, said he moved to Canada during a military coup in Nigeria. He now works as a real estate agent and has six children born in Canada — the youngest is eight years old.

Nigeria returned to democratic rule in 1999, and the man has gone back to visit several times since then without fear of being removed from Canada. He didn’t know the rules had changed when he went back again three or four years ago.

Now that there’s a cessation case against him, he feels he can no longer plan for the future. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “I’ve spent most of my life in Canada, not in Nigeria.”

The office of Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.