Thank you for the invitation to appear.

The Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers is a national organization engaged in advocacy, litigation and education regarding the rights of refugees and migrants.

As Minister Fraser noted last week, no one chooses to be a refugee, and people who cross into Canada between ports of entry are desperate to find safety. One crossing haunts me. A woman traumatized by gender-based violence in her home country, barred from seeking refugee protection in the U.S. and desperate not to be deported to further harm crossed into Canada with her two minor children by hanging on to the back of a freight train. She was later accepted as a refugee.

When this committee looked at the agreement back in 2002, it anticipated that if irregular entry became an issue and if the numbers did not decrease, the agreement should be suspended or ended.

I'll explain why it's time to revisit the STCA based on five lessons learned, and then I'll offer a recommendation.

Lesson one is that the mode of entry to Canada says nothing about the merits of a refugee claim. Acceptance rates are very similar regardless of how you arrive. The acceptance rates for refugee cases decided on their merits generally is 66%, and the acceptance rate for irregular crossers is 61%.

Lesson two is that the STCA is the cause of Roxham Road, and ending the agreement or creating more exceptions to it will disperse people from coast to coast and eliminate the funnel to Quebec. Cities and provinces throughout Canada can then provide settlement services.

Lesson three is that the number of border entries may not increase, as people may simply be rerouted. In fact, Althia Raj recently reported a senior IRCC official noting that an end to the STCA means that the situation “might not change that much, because what would happen is you wouldn’t have a Roxham Road, the people could cross at the ports of entry and they might therefore go to different ports of entry”.

The federal court thought the same thing. In its 2020 decision, it indicated that there was actually no evidence that numbers would increase if the STCA ended and, further, that the departments have always managed ebbs and flows. Recall of course that our geographic location means that Canada will always welcome only a very small drop in the global bucket of refugees.

Lesson four is that although there's talk of modernization, expansion will drive more people to enter irregularly, undetected and without any kind of screening, and of course it will put more lives at risk.

Lesson five is that people who enter through Roxham Road contribute to Canada in meaningful ways. This includes a significant number of guardian angels, those who risked their lives during the height of the pandemic working in long-term care homes and elsewhere.

The conclusion we can draw is that the deleterious effects of the STCA at this point clearly outweigh its benefits.

One option, of course, is to end or suspend the STCA, but there's an alternative. Article 6 of the STCA allows Canada to exempt classes of people or individuals on public policy grounds. It states the following: “either Party may at its own discretion examine any refugee status claim made to that Party where it determines that it is in its public interest to do so.” This provides the much-needed flexibility to address current issues.

Canada now uses only one public policy exemption. That's for individuals facing the death penalty. There used to be a second one, as mentioned earlier, for people who are on Canada's list of countries to which we don't deport. That was ended in 2009.

Options at this point could include expanding exemptions and allowing for gender-based claims, which, despite the repeal of the matter of A-B-, remain subject to highly problematic restrictions. In fact, the UNHCR recommended using public policy exemptions when it commented on Canada's draft regulations back in 2002, and this included for gender-based claims.

As well, exemptions could be created for vulnerable people who are turned around at the border and put into U.S. jails. Of course, the images of kids in cages offer a horrific window into the system that jails vulnerable people when they're simply seeking safety.

Public policy exemptions have been a mainstay of our immigration system. It makes sense to put them to use at this point.

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