End knee-jerk detentions
Two years ago, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale issued a directive that people should only be locked up pending refugee and immigration hearings as a “last resort.” He even set aside $5 million to spend on alternatives, such as electronic monitoring devices, for those considered a flight risk.
To some extent his edict was effective. The number of individuals held in detention in Canada while awaiting hearings or deportation dropped to 3,557 last year, down from 10,088 five years ago under the Harper government.
Still, a first-ever audit into the way the Immigration and Refugee Board conducts hearings reveals ongoing problems and a culture that continues to favour incarceration over the alternatives.
This should be a wake-up call for Goodale. More must be done to change the culture of a system that falls back on the easiest solution rather than the best one.
Canada’s immigration detention system should not incarcerate people unnecessarily. But the audit paints a troubling picture of a system that unfairly and inhumanely keeps people behind bars for months — or even years — at great expense to their mental, emotional and physical well-being. The cost to the government is also significant, totalling about $90,000 a year to keep someone in detention.
Alarmingly, the audit lays the blame for this on ill-informed adjudicators who often decide the fate of these cases based on misleading information — and sometimes intimidation — from Canada Border Services Agency officers. That has spurred a group of lawyers to demand the resignation of the entire board of adjudicators who preside over detention cases at the Immigration and Refugee Board.
According to the audit, detainees were often unrepresented, particularly in Ontario where detainees represented themselves in 62 per cent of the cases last year.
Yet, despite not having anyone in their corner, adjudicators did not bother to vigorously question border officials who were recommending detention.
“It appeared that the onus of proof had slipped to the detained person who was almost always unrepresented and powerless to articulate a fresh argument for release,” the audit’s author, Katherine Laird, cautioned.
What’s worse is that these findings follow several earlier warnings from respected human rights organizations, such as the United Nations and the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, of abuses within Canada’s refugee hearing system. The government should have responded then. It must make sure it doesn’t let this latest warning go unheeded.
Further, the audit echoes last year’s Star investigation, which revealed a “Kafkaesque” immigration detention system that indefinitely warehouses non-citizens away from public scrutiny and in conditions intended to punish criminals.
Appallingly, among the detainees are children who are held in immigration holding centres along with their parents, or even on their own.
People should be detained if they present a real danger to the public. But the audit found that 77 per cent of individuals were detained simply because officials feared — in some cases based on questionable information — that they were a flight risk.
Surely, the majority of those people should qualify for alternatives to detention, such as electronic monitoring.
Thankfully, that may now happen. On Tuesday, the Canada Border Services Agency made a welcome, if belated, announcement that it is finally introducing several new “alternatives to detention,” including those Goodale directed two years ago.
Laird makes several other sensible recommendations that Goodale should also pursue. There should be increased oversight of immigration detention cases, all current long-term detention files should immediately be reviewed, and hearing protocols and policies on bonds and terms of release should be updated.
Further, as the Star has argued previously, staffing at the Immigration and Refugee Board must be increased to get rid of the massive backlog and ensure all claims are settled more quickly.
It does no one any good to have people waiting in limbo, whether it’s in a shelter in Toronto or a federal detention facility, for months or even years before their cases are settled.