Lawyer falls short in bid to test refugee rules, urges others to take up cause
OTTAWA — A law that leaves refugees forever at risk of losing their permanent residency must continue to be tested before the courts, says a B.C. lawyer who fell short Thursday in his efforts to have the Supreme Court examine the issue.
The top court declined to hear lawyer Douglas Cannon’s case, which involved a refugee hoping to obtain Canadian citizenship but would have touched on a much larger debate about the principles underpinning Canada’s asylum system.
A refugee’s status can be revoked at any time, but until 2012, such a development wouldn’t have impacted their permanent resident status. Similarly, a permanent resident could have that status revoked, but still be considered a refugee.
Five years ago, the Conservative government at the time changed the law in order to remove people they felt ought not to have been given refugee status — and in turn permanent residency — in the first place.
The intent was to go after fraud, but hundreds of people properly granted refugee status now find themselves stuck in an already clogged system with little chance of a hearing any time soon, Cannon said.
“This stuff isn’t going away. It will have to be litigated until the government changes its mind because it can’t afford to keep doing this.”
Cannon’s client, Nisreen Nilam, won asylum in Canada in 2009 and permanent residency in 2011. Nilam later travelled back to his home country of Sri Lanka for two lengthy visits, using a Sri Lankan passport he’d applied for and then renewed.
Those moves are among the red flags for a government when it considers whether a refugee still needs protection from their home county and is among the grounds for socalled cessation of refugee status.
The immigration minister tried to remove Nilam’s refugee status; he in turn argued he was there to visit a sick mother and get married, trips that for myriad reasons left him in Sri Lanka for longer than intended. The government initially lost its case, but the Immigration and Refugee Board was forced by the courts to reconsider.
In the meantime, Nilam applied for Canadian citizenship. That’s how the matter nearly ended up before the Supreme Court: Since his permanent residency status was under review, the minister halted the citizenship application. Nilam sued, arguing that he met all the criteria for citizenship and that nowhere in citizenship law did it say cessation proceedings could interfere.
A lower court sided with him, but the Federal Court of Appeal overturned that decision, agreeing with the government that if Nilam’s permanent residency was suspect, then he could not be considered for citizenship.
While Cannon sought to test that legislative question before the Supreme Court, the broader one was that when a person becomes a permanent resident, that should then be the grounds of their status in Canada, not their refugee status.
“Canada changed the fundamental basis of refugee protection when it decided to now make it conditional for all refugees, even if you are a permanent resident,” he said.
“For people like Mr. Nilam who are hardworking, law-abiding, making contributions, raising families ... it is a complete waste of resources and it is a complete waste of life to say, ‘Out you go, because we can,’ and there isn’t much basis to this.”