Canada comes up short on scorecard
Compared with the U.S., Canada may seem like paradise on Earth for families seeking asylum.
But we still have a long way to go to live up to that reputation, say researchers, who give Canada a failing grade when it comes to our practice of detaining children for immigration purposes — including in jails and correctional facilities.
At a conference in Montreal on Wednesday, World Refugee Day, Hanna Gros of the University of Toronto and Delphine Nakache of the University of Ottawa presented Canada’s “scorecard” on the detention of children, giving it 49 out of 100 — and placing it around the middle of the rankings with other countries. (The official scorecards from around the world will be released in August.)
“Over the last two years, Canada has begun to address problems in the system,” said Nakache, referring to a policy directive issued by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale in November that said Canada will detain children only as a last resort.
Goodale has also pledged $138 million to improve the detention facilities and find alternatives to detention.
“But the new policy is not law and does not prohibit children from being detained … and there is no maximum length of detention, which can be in a correctional facility,” Nakache said.
To be sure, Canada does not separate asylum-seeking children from their parents, as Donald Trump’s administration has been doing on the Mexican border.
With the exception of unaccompanied minors — children who come to Canada on their own, of which there were five last year — it is usually up to the parents to decide whether the children should be “housed” with them in detention or go into foster care. Both alternatives are detrimental to children’s mental health, conference participants heard.
Nor does it keep children living indefinitely in offshore detention camps, as is the case in Australia, or sleeping in prison corridors in Malaysia, as described by other speakers at the conference on migration detention.
The number of minors behind bars for immigration purposes in Canada has, in fact, gone down in most parts of the country during the last five years — except in Quebec.
Paul Clarke of Action Refugiés Montréal, which pays regular visits to the Immigration Holding Centre in Laval, one of three in the country, believes the number of children detained in Quebec is a reflection of the increasing number of people crossing into the province irregularly. Quebec has received about 96 per cent of the asylum seekers who have crossed into Canada during the last year.
According to statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency:
About 155 minors were detained ■ with their parents in Canada between April and Dec. 31, 2017, including 102 in Quebec, 39 in British Columbia and nine in Ontario. That’s compared with 232 in 2014-2015. (These numbers are estimates, as some children may be counted twice if they overlap from one quarter to another.)
87 of them were under five years ■ old, and 35 were between six and 11 years old. They were kept in detention for an average of 16 days.
Six of them were kept as long as ■
90 days in detention, and another eight children were kept up to 180 days, or six months.
Gros says one of the major problems for which Canada lost points on the scorecard was that there is no maximum for how long children or their parents may be detained, despite the fact that the vast majority are detained only because they are considered a flight risk or do not have verifiable identity papers and could be housed in the community.
In one case in Toronto, Alpha Ochigbo was born in detention — and is therefore a Canadian citizen — but spent the next twoand-a-half years at the Immigration Holding Centre before being deported along with his mother to Cameroon. The CBSA feared that if the mother had been released she would not appear for their immigration hearings or deportation.
“Under the criminal justice system, prisoners count down to their release,” Gros said. “But when you don’t know when you’re going to get your life back, every day seems to last forever and it can trigger important mental health issues.”
Another problem centres on the fact that outside of the three Immigration Holding Centres near Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, immigration detainees and their children may end up in jails.
From April to December 2017, six children in Canada were kept in “youth centres.” The CBSA did not explain Wednesday what these were.
Finally, Gros and Nakache criticized the fact there is no civilian oversight for the CBSA, which has the discretion to detain refugee-claimants if they consider them flight risks or if they cannot verify the claimants’ identity. (Only about six per cent are detained because they are considered a danger to the public, Nakache said.)
“It’s the only police force in Canada with no oversight,” Gros said. “But immigration detainees can have legitimate complaints.”