The Challenging New Reality: Navigating the Seas of Law, Regulations, Policy and Bureaucracy
The COVID-19 pandemic is essentially over and stringent travel restrictions and limitations on removal have been repealed; but that response by this country and others has underscored the ambit and flexibility of immigration laws, including enforcement powers. The repercussions and consequences of the pandemic will continue to reverberate. As an example, the initial shut down of immigration intake led to a significant increase in the number of temporary residents in Canada with the government in 2024 committing to decrease the number of those residents by 20%. Many will not want to leave and may well have good reason not to.
Further, it’s gotten harder to navigate temporary status to permanent. The higher thresholds and limitations of economic pathways will also result in many attempting to access non-economic pathways such as the SCLP, refugee [as of September 2024 there are over a quarter million cases pending before the RPD] or humanitarian and compassionate applications under s.25(1) of the IRPA to remain in Canada. Such attempts and applications trigger immigration review, examination and potential refusal and thus engagement of enforcement action.
The dramatic increase in temporary resident numbers and the corresponding drop in public support for our heretofore relatively open and generous immigration system also sounded the death knell of a proposed broad-based amnesty for those without status in Canada. For some of us, perhaps cynical and jaded by years of practice, such a proposal was pie-in-the-sky from the start.
The hardening of attitudes towards newcomers and other migrants mirrors that of our neighbour to the south, the UK (with its risible plan now abandoned to off shore asylum claims and settlement to Rwanda) and even that of the (Western) European countries. Things have indeed changed. Germany once declared that the rising tide of immigrants be all let in “Wir shaffen das” [we can manage this or we can do this] –that was 2015. It’s now a decade later and “the mass migration of people seeking refuge from war and poverty in prosperous democracies has become a major challenge of the 21st century” <The New York Times, International Edition, Friday, October 4, 2024, “Germany is angering its neighbors” by Serge Schmemann> … engendering a rise of far right movements capitalizing on nativist sentiment and xenophobia.
It doesn’t take a soothsayer to contemplate that many will not want to leave leading to a concomitant increase the use of inadmissibility provisions and engagement of the enforcement regime. This then is the new normal for immigration officers -empowered by the IRPA, to make decisions upon application, upon entry and post-arrival; and the challenging new reality for immigration lawyers duty bound to help their clients navigate the stormy seas of laws, regulation, policy and bureaucracy.