It was in January 2017 that Justin Trudeau launched his tweet where he invited “those fleeing persecution, terror, war” to land in Canada — “know that Canada will welcome you”, he wrote. Six years later, the federal government inaugurated a new detention center to incarcerate certain asylum seekers. We can think that at the time, such a development had not crossed the mind of the Canadian Prime Minister.
In this tweet innocent, Justin Trudeau shows a good dose of recklessness, if not hypocrisy, because Canada, as vast and generous as it is believed, cannot reasonably accommodate the tens of millions of people who are forced every year to leave their country.
As we learned The duty in its Saturday edition, Ottawa inaugurated in October in Laval a detention center for asylum seekers and temporary immigrants, what is euphemistically called a “monitoring center”. Built at a cost of 50 million, the new center replaces old facilities deemed dilapidated. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), to which the center belongs, took the opportunity to increase the number of places to bring it to 153, compared to 109 for the old building. Only 66 “detainees” were there at the end of December, while the correctional centers administered by Quebec accommodated about fifteen. The residents of this “golden” federal prison, but still prison since they cannot leave it unless released, have the particularity of not having committed any crime which would justify their detention. Documents that are not in order, doubts about the identity of the foreign national or risks of flight are mentioned by the agency to justify this measure of “last resort”. As in real prisons, the detainees do not have the right to their cell phone, nor access to the Internet; One could wonder why.
Civil liberties organizations such as Amnesty International denounce the incarceration of these migrants who have committed no crime. Unlike Quebec and Ontario, British Columbia ended the agreement with the CBSA to detain migrants in provincial prisons. Alberta and Nova Scotia have announced that they will do the same. Since 2015, there have been 8,000 of these detainees in Canada — the average detention period is 22 days — including 2,000 in provincial prisons and the rest in the three CBSA detention centres.
This is relatively little considering the millions of foreign nationals who have entered the country over the past eight years. In Quebec, for example, the approximately 80 migrants currently detained compare to the 36,000 asylum seekers who would have entered via Roxham Road in 2022 alone, which is in addition to the tens of thousands of applicants already present on Quebec territory, who are still awaiting a decision from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). Or to the 150,000 asylum seekers who, according to The Journal of Montrealarrived in Quebec five years ago, or 52% of the Canadian total.
However, whether it is to obtain a work permit from the federal authorities or to obtain a definitive answer on the status of refugees, the delays are only getting longer. For asylum seekers passing through Roxham Road, these delays can extend over several years. Those whose application is rejected have time to settle here before receiving an eviction notice, an eviction that many of them will try to avoid by taking refuge in hiding. The system is dysfunctional, like other immigration streams. In this context, one wonders what good is the traumatic detention of a handful of migrants.
Among federal departments, IRCC has spent the most since 2015 on management advice from US consulting firm McKinsey, Radio-Canada reported. But the irony is that IRCC’s notorious disorganization has been compounded by the bloated increase in Canadian immigration thresholds, a 2016 recommendation by an Ottawa-appointed committee chaired by Dominic Barton. , then McKinsey’s first global executive. Subsequently, the consultant co-founded The Century Initiative, or Initiative of the Century, a lobby that promotes the project of increasing the population of Canada to 100 million by 2100.
Noting that at our expense, we are participating in this country, in which Quebec will inexorably lose its demographic and therefore political weight, in an unprecedented social experiment concocted by McKinsey is not reassuring.