Underlying logic undermined by blind application to those who have spent most of their life in Canada, where their criminality developed:
The 2013 legislation means any permanent resident sentenced to six months or more can be deported with fewer avenues of appeal. The old threshold was a two-year court sentence and more chances to appeal.
CBSA statistics show that the new rules have had the intended effect.
The total number of criminals deported from the Pacific region in 2011, 2o12 and 2013 was 174. Over the subsequent three years, 276 people were deported from the region for their criminal history.
Some have been high-profile gangsters like Barzan Tilli-Choli, of the United Nations gang, who was sent back to Iraq in January after serving almost eight years for plotting to kill the Bacon brothers. He came to B.C. as a teen in 1999.
Others, like Van Heest, suffer from serious mental health issues that contributed to their criminality.
Many of those affected have been in Canada since early childhood, but their caregivers never obtained citizenship for them.
“Somebody dropped the ball, whether it was the parent or the state if they ended up being a ward,” Golden said.
In Van Heest’s case, his family thought he was automatically a Canadian.
“By the time he was an adult and could have (applied for citizenship), he couldn’t because he had the (criminal) record and he was also dealing with a mental illness that was untreated,” Golden said.
Critics say the new rules are unforgiving and don’t look at the individual circumstances of those ordered out of Canada for criminality.
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel said she supported the legislation in 2013 and still supports it today. And she thinks the majority of Canadians do, too.
“The primary responsibility of legislators is to keep the Canadian population safe, so that’s really … why we made these changes in 2013,” she said.
Focusing on any specific case, including Van Heest’s, is the wrong approach, Rempel said.
“Where I think we go off the rails is when we look at one case in a vacuum, or talk about taking away the personal responsibility component from criminal actions.”
CBSA communications officer Kristine Wu said the agency places “the highest priority on removal cases involving national security, organized crime, crimes against humanity and criminals.”
“Everyone ordered removed from Canada is entitled to due process before the law,” she said. “Our position is clear: Once all avenues of recourse are exhausted, the person must leave Canada or be removed.”
One of those the CBSA is currently trying to deport is long-time Kelowna resident David Roger Revell, a former Hells Angel associate convicted in 2008 of conspiracy to traffic cocaine after a massive RCMP undercover operation targeting the biker gang. He was sentenced to five years.
Then in 2013, he pleaded guilty to two assault charges in a domestic violence case involving a former girlfriend and was sentenced to two years probation.
Revell, a father and grandfather who now works in Alberta, was born in England and was brought to Canada as a 10-year-old in 1974. Like Van Heest, he never got Canadian citizenship. Unlike Van Heest, his convictions are unrelated to mental illness.
Revell argued to the Immigration and Refugee Board last year that he never would have pleaded guilty in the assault case if he had known it would lead the CBSA to renew a review of his admissibility that had been on hold after the 2008 conviction.
“According to Mr. Revell, he pled guilty to simply put an end to proceedings that were requiring him to travel back and forth from Fort McMurray to Kelowna,” Immigration and Refugee Board member Marc Tessler noted in a July 2016 ruling. “According to Mr. Revell, if he had received a warning letter, he would never have pled guilty.”
Tessler agreed with Revell’s evidence that his deportation to England would have a “profound” impact on him.
“He has lived in Canada for 42 years and has only known Canada as home,” Tessler said.
But Tessler rejected Revell’s claims that his Charter rights had been violated and ordered him deported.
Revell has now asked the Federal Court to review Tessler’s decision. A hearing is set in Vancouver for May.
Revell’s lawyer Lorne Waldman said he plans to again argue that his client’s Charter rights would be violated by his deportation and that “Canadian jurisprudence should begin to acknowledge that it is just unacceptable to remove someone from the only country he’s ever really known.”
“The issue now that is coming before the court is: Are there circumstances in which it might be a violation of a person’s right to life, liberty and security of person to send that person away from a place where he has lived most of his life?”
Waldman, who is based in Toronto, said he has been inundated with calls from people living in Canada for decades who now find themselves in a similar situation to Revell and Van Heest.
“What they’ve done is they have significantly increased the number of long-term permanent residents that are being deported because the threshold now is so low,” he said. “It has had a fairly dramatic impact and that’s why we are seeing such a large number of cases now moving forward.”
Too early to tell, but stories will emerge about the extent whether the waiver is being consistently applied or not (and important that Canada is appears to be the only country to have obtained such a waiver):
Permanent residents of Canada with citizenship from any of six Muslim-majority countries can be denied entry to the United States under the new version of U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban.
After Trump issued the first version of the 90-day ban in January, federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said he had been assured by the White House that permanent residents could go to the U.S. as usual. But the language of the second version is not nearly so straightforward.
The revised ban, signed by Trump on Monday, explicitly says that a “landed immigrant” from Canada needs to apply for a “waiver” that “may” be granted, on a “case-by-case basis,” at the discretion of a consular officer or another official from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
It is not yet clear how strict or generous the U.S. government will be in giving such waivers to people applying at consulates in Canadian cities — or whether there will be any consistent policy at all.
“Canada will work with its counterparts in the United States to clarify the impacts of this order on Canadian citizens and Canadian temporary and permanent residents,” a spokesperson for the immigration ministry said Monday.
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told reporters Monday that the waiver requirement “would not substantially change the process” for permanent residents from the six countries, since they already had to apply for a visa to enter the U.S. A top Canadian immigration lawyer, though, said other kinds of waivers often take much longer to obtain than visas.
Waivers for Canadians with criminal records, for example, currently take about six months to process, said lawyer Lorne Waldman. While the U.S. might create a faster process for this new kind of waiver, he said, the existing process is the best guide for now.
Trump’s order says waivers “could” be granted. The general requirement: “the foreign national has demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that denying entry during the suspension period would cause undue hardship, and that his or her entry would not pose a threat to national security and would be in the national interest.”
Despite the waiver requirement, Canada is still getting privileged treatment in the new order. There is no explicit waiver provision allowing entry by permanent residents of Australia or the United Kingdom.
The new order bans all refugees for 120 days and visitors from Syria, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya and Yemen for 90 days. It does not affect dual citizens of Canada and the affected countries, such as Iranian-Canadians and Syrian-Canadians, who are still allowed to travel to the U.S. with their Canadian passports.
The revised ban was immediately blasted by civil liberties and human rights groups as bigoted and unconstitutional; the American Civil Liberties Union called it “Muslim Ban 2.” But it represents a major concession from a president who had mocked a “so-called judge” for putting it on hold, then defiantly promised in a tweet to “SEE YOU IN COURT” after he lost on appeal.
“The president has capitulated on numerous key provisions that we contested in court about a month ago,” Washington state attorney general Bob Ferguson, who challenged the original order, told reporters. “It bears pointing out that the administration, since that tweet, has done everything in its power to avoid seeing anyone in court when it comes to the original executive order.”
The new order is an attempt to impose a ban that can be seen to satisfy Trump’s campaign promises — first a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslim entry, then something he called “extreme vetting” — while also withstanding scrutiny from federal judges. Legal analysts said it has a much better chance in court than the vague and hastily imposed order of a month ago.
Unlike the original order, which took effect without any warning, this one is being introduced with a 10-day grace period — though Trump had defended the rapid introduction of the original order by saying that, “If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the ‘bad’ would rush into our country during that week.”
The new order excludes Iraq, whose inclusion in the first order was especially controversial because it harmed military interpreters and others risking their lives to work with the U.S. military. While the initial order singled out Syrian refugees for an indefinite ban, the revised version subjects them to the same four-month ban as other refugees.
Attempting to weaken the case that the policy amounts to anti-Muslim discrimination, the new order eliminates special treatment for refugees who are religious minorities in their home countries, a provision widely seen to be aimed at Christians.
While the number is relatively small compared to the average 260,000 immigrants (0.5 percent), it is nevertheless significant and part of ensuring overall credibility and support for immigration, another legacy of the Conservative government that should continue.
Hard to understand the regional differences between Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Do these represent the different source countries or are there some CBSA management differences?:
An average of about 1,400 Canadian immigrants are intercepted at the border each year and ordered removed from the country for not fulfilling their residency obligations, the Star has learned.
Although these newcomers can appeal to a tribunal to restore their permanent resident status under humanitarian considerations, only one in 10 succeeds in the process, according to government data.
“The tribunal is supposed to be immigrants’ last resort as the Parliament has given it the discretionary power to give immigrants a second chance if they breach the law,” said immigration lawyer Lawrence Wong, who obtained the data through an access to information request.
“But that second chance in reality is hard to come by. The national sentiment is pretty much the same. If you are an immigrant, don’t make a mistake. If you do, we want to see you kicked out.”
It’s believed to be the first time data about the loss of permanent residency at ports of entry has been made public, revealing the extent of residency noncompliance among immigrants trying to get back to Canada after lengthy stays overseas, said Wong.
Canada’s immigration law requires permanent residents to be physically present in Canada for at least 730 days in every five-year period in order to maintain their status. Otherwise, their residency will be revoked.
According to the Canada Border Services Agency, on average 1,423 permanent residents a year were stopped at the border for failing the requirement from 2010 to 2014, the most recent statistics available. During the period, Canada accepted some 260,000 newcomers annually.
The number of removal orders issued against these individuals had risen sharply to 1,413 in 2014 from 605 in 2008, when former Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney took over the department and cracked down on fraud.
Across Canada, Quebec had the highest detection rate; more than a third of the removal orders were issued in the province against the non-compliant immigrants returning to Canada.
Between 2008 and 2014, a total of 3,575 immigrants were slapped with removal orders for residency non-compliance at Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in Montreal, dwarfing the 439 and 972 people respectively intercepted at Toronto’s Pearson airport and the Vancouver International Airport.
While all these immigrants who lost their status can appeal to the immigration appeal division based on errors in law or humanitarian and compassionate grounds such as hardship from separation with family in Canada, the border services agency data show their success rate hovers at about 10 per cent — and has declined in the past few years.
Those who successfully restored their permanent resident status dropped significantly from 127 or 17 per cent of 746 appellants in 2008 to 78 or 7.7 per cent of 1,008 people in 2014.
“Once you are issued a removal order, the chances of saving your permanent status are really very limited,” said Wong.
The Annual MIPEX (international Migrant Integration Policy Index), showing Canada in third place. Canada gets lower marks for political integration as we do not provide permanent residents with municipal voting rights. However, our citizenship requirements allow more permanent residents to become citizens in less time than many of the other countries ranked higher in political integration.
Then in 2013, he pleaded guilty to two assault charges in a domestic violence case involving a former girlfriend and was sentenced to two years probation.
Multicultural Meanderings 