“For the Quebec tramway, we will wait to see the results of the lawyers’ analyses,” declared Prime Minister François Legault last week. Even if the opposition parties accuse him of trying by all means to delay this project that a federal Poilievre government would refuse to finance, we can hardly blame him for wanting to ensure the validity of the contract awarded to Alstom before CDPQ Infra is re-evaluating the project.
“There are legal opinions regarding tenders. We will respect, for sure, the legal opinions,” wisely assured the Minister of Infrastructure, also responsible for the National Capital, Jonatan Julien. The government would indeed avoid many problems by acting in accordance with the law.
This concern for legality, however, seems to have variable geometry.
Mr. Legault does not have this concern in the case of asylum seekers. Although the federal government informed him that their forced movement to other provinces would risk contravening the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — and its Quebec equivalent — he said he had no intention of examining the legal opinions on the subject. According to him, this problem is none of his business: Ottawa just has to sort itself out.
The Prime Minister estimates that the displacement of 80,000 people could be done “humanely”, which seems doubtful, but the matter would certainly end up in court, which would block the entire process for an indefinite period.
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Mr. Legault suggested that Ottawa take inspiration from France. He was thinking especially of “waiting zones”, which allow the authorities to hold an asylum seeker for a maximum period of 26 days, and of the processing time for applications, which there is four months, compared to three years. in Canada, but there would also be lessons to be learned from the French experience in matters of expulsion.
With his usual tact, François Legault asked former French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in front of the media if France could expel an asylum seeker who does not speak French. An undoubtedly interesting question, but one that we generally prefer to discuss in private.
If France has the reputation of being the European champion of expulsions, it is not necessarily the most effective. Indeed, although it issues the greatest number of “obligations to leave the territory”, barely one person in ten actually leaves France. Last year, a report from the Court of Auditors recommended that it follow the example of Germany, which instead opted for voluntary departures in return for a financial incentive. Its success rate is one in three people.
The comparison with France obviously has its limits. There is no question of expelling asylum seekers from Canadian territory, but rather of directing half of those settled in Quebec to other provinces. We can nevertheless establish a parallel: one of the main problems that France encounters is the difficulty of convincing several countries to recover their nationals, just as Quebec does not succeed in convincing the other provinces to contribute to the reception effort. .
We will never know how things would have turned out in the United Kingdom, where the conservative government of Rishi Sunak had passed a law which would have allowed the expulsion of 5,700 asylum seekers to Rwanda – with the agreement of the latter country , but in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. After the Labor victory last July, the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, canceled these expulsions, promising instead to strengthen the fight against illegal immigration.
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Mr. Legault is certainly right to think that the population agrees that we should reduce the number of asylum seekers present in the territory. It might also be so that they are forced to move to another province.
However, the last thing his government needs is to see images on TV of crying children who do not want to leave their school and their friends, or of care workers in a CHSLD who say they do not understand why we doesn’t want them when we are seriously short of staff.
Now the Prime Minister is starting to juggle again with the idea of a referendum on the repatriation of immigration powers — which he seemed to have abandoned last spring — but which he would only make a reality after calling on the leaders of the federal parties on the issue of asylum seekers during the next election campaign.
With a little luck, he himself will manage to reach the end of his mandate without having decided anything.