More foreigners being locked up: report

TORONTO — Canada’s rising detention of non-criminal foreigners in maximum-security prisons amounts to arbitrary, cruel and inhumane treatment that violates international obligations, a disturbing new report concludes.

The report by the University of Toronto’s International Human Rights Program finds that Canada Border Services Agency has become more heavy handed in dealing with migrants with little or no accountability.

Renu Mandhane, a criminal lawyer and the program’s executive director, said the report reveals “shocking gaps” in the rule of law. “A CBSA officer essentially has the discretion to determine that somebody should be held in maximum-security jail conditions,” he said Wednesday. “It was really surprising to me ... that decision was totally discretionary and also not subject to any rules.”

The report concludes incarceration can have a catastrophic impact on migrants’ mental health. It contains harrowing profiles of detainees imprisoned for as long as eight years who talk of a lack of access to support services, confinement in cold windowless cells, their despair.

“They treat us like garbage,” one inmate told researchers. “We had no rights at all.”

Figures show Canada detained more than 7,300 migrants at a cost of more than $50 million in 2013. About one-third were incarcerated in jails, though few might be considered criminals.

In Vancouver, migrant Lucia Vega Jimenez killed herself at an airport holding cell while awaiting deportation in December 2013. She had been apprehended by Transit police and then the CBSA at the Main Street SkyTrain station.

Reg Williams, a former director of CBSA immigration enforcement, said the agency has become increasingly “paramilitaristic” with an emphasis on force rather than co-operation.