Chris Selley: Upset about the state of Canada? Why not pretend it’s better? [non-deportation of immigrants accused of sexual abuse]

2025/12/04 Leave a comment

Agree, risk of losing immigration status should not be a “get out of jail” card except in extremely rare circumstances:

Again in theory, that should include a 47-year-old non-citizen, living in Bradford, Ont., who recently pleaded guilty to various charges with respect to sexually abusing a young girl — including once when he was on bail for charges of sexually abusing the same girl, whom he reportedly impregnated twice when she was no older than 13. News outlet BarrieToday reports the accused was at one point during his trial “permitted an adjournment to explore the effect his eventual guilty pleas would have on his immigration status.”

Which is, obviously, insane.

Because this is Canada, however, and we can’t ever let anything be simple, the 47-year-old’s immigration status has become something of a controversy in Ottawa.

I don’t have empirical data before me, but I suspect deportation would not strike most Canadians as an intemperate or unjust punishment for Mr. 47-year-old Child-Impregnator from Bradford. It’s neither lenient nor draconian; it’s just common sense. It’s pretty hard to get a six-month sentence in this country, after all. The absolutely vast majority of Canadians, regardless of where they’re born, manage to avoid imprisonment for their entire lives, and they hardly even have to break a sweat avoiding it. I think that’s a reasonable expectation of immigrants as well.

Alas, some of us don’t like this rule, or at least we feel honour-bound not to like it. It’s just so terribly unfancy, if not downright American-style. Judges and Liberals seem to suffer from this disproportionately. So what judges have been doing, in certain cases, is discounting the sentences non-permanent residents are handed, rather than bringing those immigration consequences down upon an offender’s and his family’s heads.

This has been widely reported. It’s not some kind of conspiracy theory. But some of us seem to have great trouble admitting it (perhaps because it’s so obviously inappropriate). In August, Radio-Canada ran an article headlined “Conservatives say the justice system favours non-citizens. Experts disagree.” Only Radio-Canada’s experts didn’t actually disagree; they mostly just seemed to object to the notion that one sentence might be compared to another to begin with, as opposed to each being considered a standalone, perfectly honed diamond of wisdom.

When (a judge) is considering a sentence, they can’t be blind to the fact that this person is not a naturalized Canadian, is still an immigrant and therefore will have additional consequences as a result of the sentence,” a Toronto immigration lawyer told Radio-Canada — which was, of course, the whole question, and it’s not a rhetorical one. Can judges be blind to that? Should they?

The Conservatives, led by immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner, want to make a law that says no: Judges wouldn’t be allowed to consider immigration consequences in handing down sentences, such as against that creep from Bradford, Ont. In the unlikely event I were advising the Liberals, I would suggest agreeing to support that law as quickly and enthusiastically as possible….

Source: Chris Selley: Upset about the state of Canada? Why not pretend it’s better?

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Chris Selley: What Canada can learn from two years of anti-Israel protests

2025/10/17 Leave a comment

Fair points. The citizenship guide does have a reference to imported conflicts: “Some Canadians immigrate from places where they have experienced warfare or conflict. Such experiences do not justify bringing to Canada violent, extreme or hateful prejudices.:

…But we still can lay down some markers about what’s acceptable protest and what isn’t — maybe in the citizenship guide, which is supposed to apply to everyone (not just immigrants). Two principles we could articulate:

Canada is, by design, a land of free expression, including protest, which we treat generously. But at some juncture, having made your point, you have to bugger off from the middle of the road and let people go about their lives. Blocking the road is, after all, illegal. Letting you do it for your cause is a courtesy, not a right. 

If people want to leave homeland conflicts behind, it’s none of your business, even if you share a homeland and think they’re letting the home side down. 

If you target a business for protest because it’s owned by someone who has a different opinion about your homeland, you will be shunned and hooted at unapologetically. 

Meanwhile, Canadian politicians need to take a very long, very hard look at how our police forces conduct their business. Like the Ottawa occupiers before them, the anti-Israel mob has taken outrageous advantage of Canadian police forces’ slavish dedication to de-escalation as the only goal that matters

Source: Chris Selley: What Canada can learn from two years of anti-Israel protests

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Chris Selley: ‘Birthright citizenship’ is an outdated concept

2025/10/11 Leave a comment

More commentary on birthright citizenship:

…The Liberals say they’re not interested in changing the law — though they didn’t freak out and call everyone racist for even raising the subject, as you might expect them to. (Is it possible they can … learn?) And it’s difficult to imagine this issue ever floating to the top of the pile, even with a Conservative government in power.

But in the absence of legislative action, as with so many files, we could commit to start collecting relevant data about the birth tourism and non-resident birth phenomenon.

Statistics Canada reports that in 2024, 1,610 people gave birth in Canada who did not reside here. That’s the number usually quoted in reference to “birth tourism” — but does it include people on temporary visas, like students and temporary foreign workers? Those aren’t necessarily abuses of any system; people do shag, regardless of their immigration status, and sometimes those people do get pregnant.

When I inquired of Statistics Canada about this, I got an intensely Canadian answer. “The mother’s residency status is typically determined based on the information she provides on the birth registration form. However, the specific requirements and procedures may vary by jurisdiction,” a spokesperson explained. “Since this is self-reported, we can’t tell from the data whether someone is a temporary resident or not.”

Could we at least do better than that? Is that too much to ask — to know the scope of the problem that we’re probably not going to solve?

Source: Chris Selley: ‘Birthright citizenship’ is an outdated concept

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ICYMI – Chris Selley: Canada’s refugee system — and the world’s — is overdue for an overhaul

2025/07/22 Leave a comment

About 70 percent of refugees already live close to their country of origin but makes sense for Canada to support seeking refuge in neighbouring countries:

…The simple fact is, Canada is not equipped to handle as many refugee claims as we currently accept. If we were, there wouldn’t be African migrants sleeping on Toronto sidewalks. There wouldn’t have been 281,000 pending asylum cases as of March 31.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government is certainly aware of the issue. Bill C-2 proposes a one-year deadline after arriving in Canada for claiming asylum — so people with expired or revoked visas couldn’t apply, for example — and to eliminate a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement that allows illegal border-crossers who evade capture for two weeks to apply for asylum nevertheless.

Both are entirely reasonable. But the current issue of The Economist, cover headline “Scrap the refugee system,” suggests the sort of wholesale changes to the global refugee system that I have been arguing for forever. It’s interesting not so much as a piece of journalism as it is to know that liberal (and Liberal) policymakers very much tend to read The Economist.

“About 123 million people have been displaced by conflict, disaster or persecution. … All these people have a right to seek safety,” the magazine’s editorial observes. “But ‘safety’ does not mean access to a rich country’s labour market. Indeed, resettlement in rich countries will never be more than a tiny part of the solution.”

The goal, the august organ argues, should be for refugees to receive asylum closer to home — ideally in culturally and linguistically similar countries whose population will tend to be more sympathetic. For the money that rich countries spend processing everyone who manages to make it to their shores — who are generally by definition not the world’s most imperilled or downtrodden, else they wouldn’t be able to get here — they could help vastly more people to safety, even if not First World prosperity. (The latter was never the goal of the current system.)

This is an idea that would require multilateral co-operation to achieve full bloom, of course. But many First World countries are far more hostile to asylum-seekers, if not immigrants in general, than Canada is. If Canada significantly restricted refugee claims made on Canadian soil, and instead refocused its efforts on helping people find refuge closer to home, it would set a useful example — not least because we have been so welcoming, to a fault, in the past.

Source: Chris Selley: Canada’s refugee system — and the world’s — is overdue for an overhaul

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Chris Selley: Liberals wrap much-needed refugee reform in a terrible privacy-invading package

2025/06/06 Leave a comment

Another commentary arguing C-2 asylum provisions are reasonable:

…This sure looks like an attempt to leverage Trumpian mayhem for the same purposes. It will and should be fought on those grounds.

It’s especially unfortunate because Bill C-2 also proposes to inject some relatively hardhearted sanity into our perennially out-of-control refugee system — changes that by rights would be debated on their own, without invoking Donald Trump’s name every 30 seconds, because these problems are not at all of the president’s making. For example, Bill C-2 proposes a one-year deadline for being in Canada, after which you won’t be able to apply for asylum, which is a clear response to the number of temporary residents trying to hang on in Canada using the refugee system. And it proposes expanding the Safe Third Country Agreement such that anyone crossing illegally from the U.S. would be ineligible to claim asylum, no matter how long they lie low upon arrival.

These are reasonable measures, completely in keeping with countries with far better human-rights records than Canada’s. Someone doesn’t just suddenly remember being persecuted after a year of not mentioning it. The principle of seeking asylum in the first technically safe country you arrive in may be unrealistic: no one willing to risk their lives for a better life in the United States or Canada is likely to settle on Mexico, considering the ordeals most refugees from Central America have already been through. But when a country like Canada accepts hundreds of refugee claims a year from the U.S and Europe, you know things have been taken to an extreme….

…Refugee advocates will argue, reasonably enough, that the solution for a self-styled humanitarian beacon like Canada would be to devote enough resources to the refugee-determination system such that we could adjudicate them quickly and efficiently. But no government ever, ever does that. We have a backlog of 280,825 asylum claims — roughly 0.7 per cent of the Canadian population.

Something has to give. And that something has absolutely nothing to do with Canadians’ IP addresses.

Source: Chris Selley: Liberals wrap much-needed refugee reform in a terrible privacy-invading package

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Chris Selley: One Ontario party’s against cancelling Canadian historic figures. It’s not Conservatives

2025/02/15 Leave a comment

Of note:

Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie is not a fan of the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) push to rename three schools. These are the ones currently bearing the accursed names of our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald; of Scottish abolitionist Henry Dundas (of whom John Graves Simcoe, founder of Toronto, was a great fan; and of Egerton Ryerson, the crusading early supporter of public education in Upper Canada (who introduced school boards to the province, ironically enough).

“(President) Trump’s trade war reminds us why Canadian pride matters,” Crombie said in a statement, when I asked her about it. “Our history isn’t perfect, but we should learn from it — not rewrite it. (Conservative Leader Doug) Ford dodges tough conversations. I won’t. I’m proud of Canada.”

Ford hasn’t said anything about the plans to change the names, though the Canadian Institute of History Education is pressing him to. It’s leading a well-argued pushback against this typically slapdash and insulting decision, which (per the TDSB) is “based on the potential impact that these names may have on students and staff based on colonial history, anti-indigenous racism and their connection to systems of oppression.”

Note: “potential impact” they “may have.” In other words, no one asked for this. Rather, unelected educrats are doing it in the name (if not on the backs of) minority students who might well be far more interested in and respectful of actual Canadian history than the people running the schools are.

I asked Team Bonnie about this because she had already gone to bat for Macdonald earlier in the campaign, or at least for his woebegone statue at Queen’s Park. Designed by Hamilton MacCarthy, erected in 1894, it currently lives inside a plywood box for fear that unveiling it would lead to it being vandalized — as it was in 2020, necessitating repairs that the general public still hasn’t laid eyes upon. (Attacking statues is still technically illegal, for the record, but evidently only in the way that jaywalking is technically illegal.)

“Somebody should show some leadership,” Crombie told the Toronto Sun last month saying she was opposed to boxing up the statue. “Make a decision and deal with it.”…

Source: Chris Selley: One Ontario party’s against cancelling Canadian historic figures. It’s not Conservatives

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Chris Selley: Liberals gave anti-Israel protesters everything, but they’re still paying for it

2025/01/22 Leave a comment

Sadly accurate:

…The response to Sunday’s gong show has mostly been the same dispiriting, meaningless platitudes we’ve been hearing since October 2023. Adjectives are deployed: “outrageous,” “intolerable,” “un-Canadian,” even “illegal.” But to no end.

“It’s good to protest,” Freeland burbled at her campaign launch, which is an odd thing to say when lunatics are protesting you for not doing something that you couldn’t and can’t. “But it is not OK to stop others from speaking,” Freeland continued.

She’ll get no argument from me on that point … except that it clearly is OK, to the extent that no one ever suffers any consequences for doing it. It’s also not OK to protest Jewish neighbourhoods because they’re Jewish, or businesses because they’re owned by Jews. It’s not OK to fly an antisemitic terrorist organization’s flag. It’s not remotely OK, indeed it’s a national scandal, that many Jewish Canadians are very understandably scared.

But here we are. And no one in charge, or auditioning to be in charge, seems to have anything halfway resembling a plan, strategy or solution to deal with this thuggery.

Source: Chris Selley: Liberals gave anti-Israel protesters everything, but they’re still paying for it

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Chris Selley: Liberals’ failed citizenship bill will soon be the Conservatives’ problem

2025/01/14 Leave a comment

Conservatives should simply introduce a bill similar to C-71 but requiring the residency requirement be met within a five-year period as per permanent residents:

There is much for conservatives to celebrate about the death of the Liberals’ legislative agenda, which is one of the chief effects of proroguing Parliament: Every government bill in progress “cease(s) to exist,” as the House of Commons’ procedural website puts it, and would in theory have to start at square one once Parliament returns on March 24. In practice, of course, the only real order of business then will be bringing down the government. It is an ex-legislative agenda.

The death of Bill C-71, however, which would have amended the Citizenship Act with respect to so-called “second-generation-born-abroad” children of Canadian citizens, is potentially a serious problem. It’s at the very least a problem, and it’s one the Conservatives need a plan to solve starting on Day One.

I’ll try to explain the issue as simply as I can.

Once upon a time, Canadian citizenship could be passed down through the generations essentially forever: So long as you were a Canadian citizen, no matter how much time (if any) you had spent here, your children had an automatic birthright to citizenship. The Harper government changed the law in 2009: People who were born as Canadian citizens in other countries could no longer pass on citizenship to any of their children who were also born abroad.

The law has produced some maddening and very sad situations, which I have written about in the past. But most cases are probably more like my friends Tim and Emily’s — not disastrous, just arbitrary and pointless.

Tim and Emily were both born in Canada as Canadian citizens; both were raised and educated in Canada. They moved to Dubai for a few years to work, as tens of thousands of Canadians do, and had their daughter Tina there. Tina automatically became a Canadian citizen. They then moved back to Canada, where their son Mike was born. (These aren’t their real names.)

Were Mike to have a daughter in Dubai in the future, she would automatically be Canadian. Were Tina to have a daughter in Dubai in the future, she would not automatically be Canadian, because she would be the “second generation born abroad.”

(Bizarrely, Tina has lesser rights in this respect than a naturalized citizen. If you immigrate to Canada and become a citizen, the Citizenship Act considers you to have been born in Canada for the purposes of passing on citizenship.)

In December 2023, Justice Jasmine Akbarali of the Ontario Superior Court struck down this rule, which lives in a single section of the Citizenship Act, as unconstitutional. She gave the government six months to craft a legislative remedy.

That remedy was Bill C-71, which allowed people like Tina  to pass on citizenship to children born abroad so long as they could demonstrate a “substantial connection” to Canada — namely having spent 1,095 days in the country over the previous five years. It’s exactly what we require immigrants to demonstrate before they can receive citizenship. It seemed reasonable enough to constitutional lawyer Sujit Choudhry, who represented the applicants at the Ontario Superior Court.

“We thought that was fair. It was simple, it was equitable. It’s a rule that (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) administers every day in relation to permanent residents who are naturalizing,” says Choudhry.

For some reason the Liberals decided to go much further. Most notably, Bill C-71 grants “citizenship by descent (to) all persons who were born outside Canada … to a parent who was a citizen” before the new law took effect. That’s an awful lot of people with the stroke of a pen — no one really knows how many; last month, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated 115,000 — at a time when people want more control over immigration, not less. It also doesn’t cut off at the second generation: Third and fourth generations born abroad could receive citizenship if a parent could demonstrate this substantial connection.

The Liberals having lost any ability to govern, Justice Akbarali granted the government three extensions to her original six-month deadline. The third she granted “reluctantly,” emphasizing her displeasure at the government’s lack of “legislative diligence” but noting that “the interests of the public will be negatively affected if (her ruling) comes into force without replacement legislation in place.”

And there, for the Conservatives, is the rub. If the section of the Citizenship Act that Akbarali struck down simply disappears with nothing to replace it, we wouldn’t return to the status quo circa 2022. We would return to the status quo circa 2008: unlimited hereditary citizenship, which no one wants or is asking for.

“Allowing (my ruling) to take effect without replacement legislation would … result in … an unknowable number of people becoming automatic Canadian citizens,” Akbarali wrote.

That third extension expires on March 19, before Parliament could even theoretically get back to work on the file. In light of that, and of Akbarali’s previously stated concerns, odds are the government will ask for and receive another extension. But all that does is punt the ball to Pierre Poilievre’s first citizenship minister, who most certainly will not want to be seen opening the floodgates to any real or perceived “citizens of convenience.”

My impression of the Conservatives on this file is that they don’t want to be seen supporting what could be viewed as more generous citizenship laws. They want citizenship to have more value, not less, both practically and philosophically — and I’m all for that. But there is nothing remotely unpatriotic about working abroad for a few years, even if you happen to have been born abroad while your parents did the same. And it doesn’t bolster the value of citizenship to make life difficult for people who follow this very common life path.

The Liberals were most of the way to a perfectly reasonable remedy. The Conservatives should adopt the “substantial connection” test as their own, probably with a cutoff at the second generation, ditch the weird blanket citizenship-grant, pass it quickly and move on to tougher issues.

Source: Chris Selley: Liberals’ failed citizenship bill will soon be the Conservatives’ problem

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Chris Selley: The perils of ‘defining’ bigotry

2024/11/16 Leave a comment

A valid dissenting view. Although I find illustrative examples are helpful improving understanding and can be the basis for conversation:

…This is the world we live in. If Holocaust denial is illegal (or sort of), then, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t denying the Nakba or the disastrous effects of the residential school system be illegal (or sort of) as well? A reasonable person could give a reasonable answer to that question. But governments aren’t reasonable people.

As I say, I totally understand Jewish groups’ concern. Some of the definitions of anti-Palestinian racism out there certainly seem studiously, deliberately vague. Citing the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East includes as examples “erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians,” which is meaningless; and “justifying violence against Palestinians,” which could easily include defending Israel’s right to retaliate against Hamas atrocities.

But it should also be noted that Elghawaby welcomed the prospect of a definition, not any specific definition. I see little point in such “definitions” if they’re not going to be enshrined in law. But it would have made much more sense for Canada to craft its own definition of antisemitism instead of signing on to an international one that, in my view, does activate freedom-of-speech concerns. Free speech in Canada is far more protected than in many of our peer nations, and that’s a good thing.

It probably would have made far more sense still to leave all of this alone. Canadian law sets an appropriately high bar for prosecuting hate speech against any group. We don’t need the added confusion and division of “defining” every single form of bigotry.

Source: Chris Selley: The perils of ‘defining’ bigotry

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Chris Selley: Imagine the chaos if Israeli soccer comes to Canada

2024/11/12 Leave a comment

Not an appealing thought experiment:

…It was a terribly grim landmark day for European Jews, and indeed for Europe in general. The World Jewish Congress estimates there are only about 30,000 Jews in the Netherlands: roughly one-eighth as many as in 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust. There might be even fewer than that in very short order, if Thursday’s madness becomes routine. Canadians, Jews especially, are right to wonder whether it could happen here.

The answer is, basically, sure it could. But it could also be prevented. And this should have been. It looks like a colossal failure of policing. It’s easy to say from a desk on the other side of the Atlantic, but this was entirely predictable.

Reports out of Amsterdam Wednesday night were alarmingly and obviously portentous of what occurred the next day. Some purported Maccabi-supporting hooligans had assaulted a taxi driver and ripped down Palestinian flags, while chanting anti-Palestinian slogans.

Even if it weren’t true, the fact those stories were out there in the wild should have been reason enough to expect retaliation — and then some.

Clearly what happened Thursday night isn’t primarily about soccer. It’s about primordial hatred. But alas, soccer incubates primordial hatred. That’s true within the Netherlands: Ajax supporters, few of whom are Jewish, have traditionally embraced the team’s Jewish roots (they often refer to themselves as “the Jews”) and their rivals — especially supporters of Rotterdam club Feyenoord — have often taunted Ajax with antisemitic chants like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas, followed by a hissing noise. From a North American perspective, it’s almost beyond belief.

…It’s not inconceivable that Israel might qualify for the 2026 World Cup, and that it might play one or more games in Toronto or Vancouver. I shudder to imagine what that would look like. Police don’t just need to be prepared for serious Amsterdam-style violence; they, and their political overseers, need somehow to convince Canadian Jews and their friends that they’re actually safe. It’s a tough job, nowadays.

Source: Chris Selley: Imagine the chaos if Israeli soccer comes to Canada

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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