Alberta and B.C. both add three months to their contracts
Alberta was going to be the first province in Canada to stop putting migrants in jail who were being held by the federal government for administrative reasons. Instead, it extended its contract with the federal government three days before the old contract was set to end.
Its agreement to hold immigrants in detention was supposed to end on June 30, 2023. British Columbia’s agreement was supposed to end at the end of July.
But the federal government and the two provinces have agreed to extend the contracts until Sept. 29, 2023 for Alberta and Oct. 31, 2023 for British Columbia.
Radio-Canada/CBC has confirmed these extensions with the office of Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, which is in charge of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).
Hanna Gros, a refugee lawyer and researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that the decision is “inexcusable” and “shameful.”
She said, “It seems like the federal government is determined to keep breaking human rights in this Kafkaesque system.”
Many experts and lawyers believe that it is against international law to lock up migrants for administrative reasons.Also, there is no time limit on immigration detention in Canada, so migrants never know when they will get out of jail.
But B.C. has said that the extension only applies to foreign nationals who are already in jail and that starting August 1, 2023, the province will no longer accept new immigration detainees.
So far, eight provinces, including Ontario and Quebec, have given Ottawa the one-year notice needed to cancel their agreements on immigration detention.
In a letter to the PM, people want to stop locking up migrants
This week, 45 groups from Canada and around the world sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking his government to stop locking up migrants right away.The people who signed the letter were worried that the federal government was sending immigration detainees to other provinces instead of letting them go.
“At the start of the pandemic, the government let people out of immigration detention at a rate that had never been seen before,” Gros said.
She said that dozens of community-based organizations across Canada can help migrants and refugees in ways that are right for them.
Most people who are in immigration detention are there because the CBSA thinks they won’t show up for immigration procedures, like a removal.
From 2015 to 2020, about a quarter of the 8,000 migrants a year that the CBSA detained were sent to provincial jails.
By 2021-2022, the number of immigration detainees had dropped to about 3,000, but about a quarter of them were still being held in provincial jails.Most of the others were held in one of three federal immigration detention centers.
The office of Minister Mendicino says that the government continues to use jails less and that three-quarters of the migrants still being held “are there because of serious criminality.”
Immigration lawyers have pointed out that these convictions usually happened when migrants were young or were tied to crimes that don’t pose a threat to society.