Bill C-2: Another Carney deal with the Devil

Even before the notorious C-5 that runs roughshod over Indigenous rights and the environment, Carney introduced Bill C-2, the “Strong Borders Act,” currently making its way through the House of Commons. Its main target is asylum-seekers, refugees, and migrants, but it unites an assault on civil liberties and increased powers of state repression against all.

 

Legally, Trump’s tariff threat and the demand for a stronger border is based on alleged Fentanyl trafficking. But stronger borders against migrants and refugees is the real goal, and Carney is more than willing to go along: he represents a class that wants to continue the scapegoating of migrants and immigrants that surged under Trudeau. 

 

From the end of 2021, the number of deportations of undocumented people increased exponentially. There was a constant narrative that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis and stealing jobs and spots in higher education, specifically targeting international students and the migrant labour they perform. 

 

Over 1.2 million people have had study or work permits simply expire. Getting rid of people this way may be less overt than ICE raids, but it is no less real. 

 

On June 16, International Domestic Workers Day, twenty migrant domestic care workers occuped the lobby of a federal immigration building in Toronto to make this reality less invisible. They refused to leave until they got a direct phone call or meeting with Immigration Minister Lena Diab, demanding the right for themselves and their families to stay in Canada permanently and with dignity.

 

Carney needs this scapegoating to distract from an unprecedented arms build-up, fast-tracking building, mining, and pipelines against Indigenous consent and environmental protections, and to divide and conquer those who will not see their lives improve from any of this. Enter: Bill C-2.

 

Impact on migrants and refugees

 

The single most obvious crackdown on refugee rights is the one-year rule: C-2 bars anyone from making an asylum claim in Canada if they have been in the country for more than a year, even if they are at risk. 

 

This is worse than the US, which also has a one-year bar: you can leave the US and come back, and the one-year clock starts again. C-2 doesn’t allow this, and it makes the one-year bar retroactive to 2000. So, it would prevent someone who was in Canada as a baby in 2000 from claiming refugee status as an adult. This has wide implications: think of what it would mean for new trans refugees trying to escape the increasingly draconian anti-LGBTQ legislation of the current US regime.

 

C-2 also provides the power to revoke permanent residence status, work permits, and study permits without any independent judicial process. Currently, the federal government can cancel permanent residence status for extreme reasons such as criminality.

 

But C-2 would allow them to cancel or suspend documents already issued and impose new conditions on existing documents, where they believe it is in the “public interest” to do so. “Public interest” is not defined, and there is no due process.

 

This is an escalation of the xenophobic attack on migrant students and temporary foreign workers and an expansion to permanent residents. It could pave the way to mass cancelation of permits, echoing the ICE crackdown in the US. 

 

Safe third country

 

C-2 builds on another pre-existing border enforcement policy against asylum seekers, Canada’s “Safe Third Country Agreement” with the US, which has long been opposed by refugee advocates, including a failed challenge in the Supreme Court. The agreement identifies the US as a safe port of entry for refugee claimants, therefore denying them entry to Canada at border crossings. 

 

For awhile there was a loophole that allowed irregular border crossings between official ports of entry. During this time, more than 100,000 migrants and refugees crossed through the US-Quebec border at the unofficial entry point of Roxham Road, 50 km south of Montreal. 

 

Then in March 2023, Biden and Trudeau agreed to outlaw the loophole: they announced the expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement across the entire land border, including unoffical crossings over water. They put in place the “14 day rule”: once an asylum seeker has entered irregularly from the US, they can only file an asylum claim if they manage to stay in Canada for 14 days without being detected by law enforcement. If they make an asylum claim before this, they are returned to the US.

 

Not only does this existing rule require people to hide before the 14 days are up, Bill C-2 creates a new “14 day rule” for after irregular entry: if you do manage to stay for 14 days and then make a refugee claim, your claim will not be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board, denying you access to the refugee determination process. Your only recourse would be a “Pre-removal Risk Assessment,” which has no automatic stay of removal in most cases, a very low rate of acceptance, and no appeal. 

 

The combo of Safe Third County and C-2 will mean no way out for both US residents fleeing Trump’s anti-trans and anti-immigrant crackdown and asylum seekers who have no choice but to pass through the US to reach Canada.

 

Trudeau and Biden tied the border knot, and Carney is tightening it.

 

Surveillance

 

C-2’s full title is “An Act respecting certain measures relating to the security of the border between Canada and the United States and respecting other related security measures.” While government propaganda focuses on the border, C-2 is also a pretext to expand surveillance powers for police and intelligence agencies to monitor everyone, regardless of immigration status. A manufactured border crisis is being used to push through diverse measures to crack down on dissent.

 

Here are just a few concerns identified by the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group: changes to the Canada Post Act would allow Canada Post to open and search letter mail, which is currently prohibited; changes to the Oceans Act would transform the Canadian Coast Guard into a security force, allowing them to engage in “security patrols and the collection, analysis and disclosure of information or intelligence”; and changes to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act and Immigration and Refugee Protection Act would allow for the widespread sharing of personal information of immigrants to Canada with other government departments, as well as with foreign entities. 

 

It could also allow information-sharing across departments that has nothing to do with immigration, like passport information, more “lawful access” of personal info without a warrant or court order, and more powers for investigation of any offence, not just criminal.

 

How can we resist?

 

There will likely be attempts to amend C-2 as it goes through Parliament. But there is nothing to amend: it fundamentally replaces at least some right to individual arbitration and appeal of refugee status, as imperfect as that is, with outright collective punishment of asylum seekers. And it expands that to threats against permanent residents, and ultimately to the surveillance of citizens. It’s not just about a stronger border but a stronger capitalist state.  

 

But even if it passes, we can take a lesson from our siblings in the US who are confronting ICE: we can resist when unjust laws are enforced against migrants, immigrants, and refugees.

 

On Sept 20, a mass protest for the climate will stand up to all the carnage that Carney is spreading, including against refugees, migrants, and immigrants. This could be an opportunity to make links not only between the various attacks contained within C-2 but also against all the fronts of the Carney assault. Join the Draw the Line rally near you. 

 

We need constant myth-busting about who is really to blame for the housing, job, and education crisis, and who is not. Migration is not the crisis, capitalism is. It’s the dead-end caused by landlords, bosses, and the politicians who do their dirty work.  

 

Build for September 20, sign the petitions against C-2 and find out more about what migrant and civil liberties advocates are doing to both fight it and bust all the racist myths about immigration: