The news passed very smoothly. On Monday, Radio-Canada revealed that the Trudeau government had abandoned its plan to regularize undocumented people currently living on Canadian territory. “The context and the political climate have changed,” a source close to the federal government simply explained to journalist Romain Schué.
The announcement is nevertheless major. Concretely, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people already present on Canadian territory. People who therefore already occupy housing, and whose children are already enrolled in school (and who do not necessarily have the same status as that of the parents).
Their sources are diverse. Some are foreign students or temporary workers who did not leave the country once their visa expired. Others applied for asylum upon arriving in Canada, which were refused. However, the refusal of refugee status by the Canadian authorities does not mean that the person can return home in complete safety. Many therefore prefer to continue living in Canada in hiding rather than leaving.
In still other cases, Canada itself recognizes that the countries of origin are not safe, even if the asylum requests have been rejected. This is particularly the case for nearly 4,000 Haitians stuck by Canadian bureaucracy, most of whom live in the greater Montreal region. On the one hand, the authorities did not judge that the risks to the personal security of these asylum seekers were significant enough to grant them the right to stay in Canada. On the other hand, we recognize that the crisis in Haiti is so serious that since 2019, the Border Services Agency has declared a moratorium on deportations to this country. If the security situation in Haiti, which has only gotten worse since 2019, worries the authorities to this extent, why were these Haitian nationals not admitted as refugees? Go figure.
Haitians are not the only ones in this situation. “Administrative stays of removal” are also in place in several countries where the humanitarian situation is particularly alarming. We are talking about the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, Syria, Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Burundi, Venezuela, Iran, and certain regions of Somalia. To these countries, we must add Afghanistan, the Republic of Congo and Iraq, where a “temporary suspension of returns” has been adopted, given the armed conflicts or crisis situations that pose a risk to “the whole of the civilian population. Once again: if these places on the globe are considered too dangerous for Canada to send its nationals back, why have they been refused refugee status?
Nationals of the countries named above therefore have, in large part, access to temporary work permits which they must continually renew, until the situation in their country improves (how?) and Canada decides to deport them. We are talking about several years of life, therefore, caught in administrative limbo: we can neither build sustainably here, nor go elsewhere. In the meantime, we hold all kinds of jobs, often in sectors heavily affected by labor shortages.
For people who no longer have access to these temporary work permits, regardless of the country of origin, “undeclared” work remains the only option. We know, for example, that temporary agricultural workers from several Central American countries stay in Canada after their permits expire and continue to work on our farms. Farmers benefit from this illegal workforce who can no longer negotiate their working conditions, given the legal situation. Rights defense organizations have therefore sounded the alarm on the abuses and exploitation that are very present in sectors where employers resort to the employment of people without status.
The government is deprived of taxes, workers are deprived of their rights, and employers hit by labor shortages have fewer and fewer options to legally fill the positions they need. : here, in summary, are the consequences of status quowhere hundreds of thousands of people residing in Canada fell through the cracks of the system.
This is the problem that the Trudeau government intended to remedy for several years now, until “the context and the political climate [aient] changed.” Still according to information from Radio-Canada, we are now considering small-scale regularization programs, which will perhaps be announced during the spring parliamentary session, or even in the fall.
We will probably seek to justify the regularization of certain specific groups on the basis of the situation in the country of origin, or the “essential” nature of the job held. But the problem with “targeted” programs is that the complexity of human life and economic realities never fully fit into the boxes set by the bureaucracy. The more we seek to establish precisely who “deserves” regularization of their status in Canada, the more we will find life stories that will highlight the arbitrary nature of the “grace” of the system.