Immigration law in Canada

SIGNIFICANCE: Canadian immigration legislation delineates national responsibility for immigration.

Until the mid-twentieth century, Canada traditionally restricted immigration to northern and western Europeans. After World War II, Canada’s economy boomed, and the business lobby exerted pressure to open immigration channels. Starting in the 1950s, Canada needed immigrants in order to have sufficient people to maintain its economy. On the other hand, there was a desire to maintain the predominance of northern and western Europeans in the population. During the twenty-first century, immigration increased to record levels, as new laws allowed new residents, including refugees, to move to Canada more easily.

The Immigration Act of 1952 contributed to European domination in the Canadian population by giving the minister of immigration and immigration officials wide discretionary powers to open and close off immigration to any group. However, in the 1950s, many developing nations gained independence, and Canada had to consider their growing importance as a trading partner and their influence in the United Nations. Thus, Canada started by assigning small quotas to Asian Commonwealth partners. When the expected inflow from northern and western Europe did not materialize, Canada set up offices in Italy, which started the large Italian influx that climbed into the hundreds of thousands. By the mid-1960s, Italians were the dominant laborers in Canada’s construction industry.

Changing Policies

The need for laborers and the refugee issue challenged Canadian immigration policy and the Canadian policy on refugees. The change started in 1956, when Hungarian refugees, following the communist takeover in Hungary, poured into Australia. By sending teams to refugee settlements and setting aside established procedures, Canada successfully resettled thirty-seven thousand Hungarians in Canada. In the early 1960s, the Canadian market for laborers began to shrink, and active immigration work fell by 50 percent. De facto segregation existed during this period: Immigration offices were established in Europe and North America, but only two in Asia.

In the 1960s, illegal entry became a problem. The numerous undocumented immigrants prompted the creation of a government commission to review all aspects of immigration. The White Paper on Immigration released in 1966 called for a complete and final overhaul of Canadian immigration policy. This policy should be free of discrimination based on race or ethnicity. The White Paper of Canada on immigration also advocated the right of Canadian citizens to sponsor immediate relatives, if their educational and occupational standards met those required of other immigrants.

When the report came up for discussion in the parliamentary committee, ethnic communities exhibited surprising strength. By 1970, they represented one-third of Canada’s population and had become a “third force” in Canadian politics. They were confident, had economic affluence, and demanded a new deal for themselves, which included a society that demanded less conformity to the English-speaking culture and a more pluralistic focus. One response to these demands, in the later 1960s, was the development and implementation of an equitable immigration system based on domestic economic requirements and on prospects for short-term and long-term integration. From 1967 to the mid-1970s, the key immigration issues for Canada were refugees (Czechoslovakian [modern-day Czechs and Slovaks], Ugandan, Asian, and Chilean) and illegal immigration.

Report on Immigration

In 1972, Robert Andras, who was to be the chief architect of the Immigration Act of 1976, became minister of workforce and immigration. Andras not only revitalized his department but also energetically worked for immigration reform. In September 1973, he initiated a major review of immigration and population policies, which resulted in the publication of a green paper on the subject. Because there was a lack of scholars and scholarship on the subject, the document was disappointing, overcautious, and inadequate. Consequently, a Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons was appointed in March 1975. The committee held fifty public hearings, heard four hundred witnesses, and received fourteen hundred briefs. The report it presented to Parliament in November 1975, was warmly received, and sixty of its sixty-five recommendations were accepted. Its principal recommendation was that Canada continue to be a country of immigration for demographic, economic, family, and humanitarian reasons. The report argued that a new immigration act should contain a clear and formal statement of principal objectives concerning admission, nondiscrimination, sponsorship of relatives, refugees, and classes of persons prohibited. Operational details should be specified in the regulations.

The report communicated that immigration should be a central variable in Canada’s population policy to forestall the decline of the country’s population, especially of francophones. In relation to population policy, immigration should be linked to population growth and economic conditions. However, the policy and target figures should be determined and presented for parliamentary scrutiny after consulting with the provinces. Other recommendations were that the point system be retained but modified to encourage settlement in underdeveloped areas, and that more staff be hired and better enforcement procedures be instituted.

Immigration Act of 1976

These recommendations were incorporated into the Immigration Act of 1976, which had its first reading on November 22, 1976 (hence that year has become linked with the name of the act), received royal assent on August 5, 1977, and became law on April 10, 1978. The act contained constructive provisions and was politically sensitive and forward-looking. It made a positive contribution to the Canadian public image in the area of immigration management. Its most significant provisions were included in a clear statement of the basic principles of Canadian immigration policy, as recommended by the Special Joint Committee—the first time that had been attempted in Canadian immigration law.

The act created a new system of planning and managing Canadian immigration. It sought to involve the provinces in immigration planning and decision making, as well as to open the process to parliamentary and public discussion. The act established three classes of immigrants: family, refugee, and others selected on the basis of the point system. Ministerial discretion was reduced in areas of exclusion, control, and enforcement. Other provisions dealt with refugees, revising the point system and ensuring that actual immigrant landings were consistent with announced immigration levels.

The Immigration Act of 1976 was praised as a responsible and forward-looking piece of legislation. In some respects, the act proved worthy of that praise. In 1979, Canada’s commitment to easing the distress of refugees, displaced persons, and the persecuted was seriously challenged by the “boat people” of Southeast Asia. There was a great outpouring of public concern for the situation. The government dispatched immigration officials to the refugee camps and, by the end of 1980, admitted more than sixty thousand ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Chinese from Southeast Asia—the highest per capita “boat people” resettlement program of any nation. One group that has become highly visible is entrepreneurs, who, with an investment of $250,000, can immigrate to Canada. Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong have been particularly noticeable in this category.

All did not go as expected, however. Sympathy for those entering Canada and then claiming refugee status waned, because undocumented immigration continued to be a major problem. The law resulted in a backlog of refugee-status-determination cases. The provinces, except for Quebec and Ontario, did not cooperate in setting up population guidelines. The potentially valuable Demographic Policy Steering Group and Demographic Policy Secretariat disappeared, and federal government efforts to develop a population policy were initially stalled. There has been a long-term trend of fertility falling in the industrialized world, especially in Canada, and rising in the nonindustrialized countries. Thus, by the mid-1980s, Canada had to develop a population policy for falling birth rates and emigration to the United States; it had to use immigration as a vital part of its population policy. Because western and northern European countries were no longer significant sources of immigration, Canada turned to Asia as a means of maintaining a sufficient population level. The Immigration Act of 1976 provided the framework for Canada to adapt to changing circumstances and to exhibit humanitarian behavior by providing refuge to the dispossessed in the world.

Immigration and Refugee Protection Act

In 2002, the Immigration Act of 1976 was replaced by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), passed by Parliament the previous year. Among other provisions, this law established three broad classes of immigrants: family class, economic class, and refugees. The economic class was established to enable Canada to admit highly educated and employable immigrants likely to make positive contributions to the economy. Controversially, the government, under then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, declined to implement the provision that would establish a Refugee Appeal Division to give refugee claimants the right to appeal determinations of refugee status, while still implementing the provision that reduced the number of board members hearing each refugee claim from two to one. This decision drew international criticism for putting decisions on each claim in the hands of a single individual while failing to establish a mechanism for refugee claimants to appeal the decisions on the merits. Several subsequent attempts to pass a bill to compel the creation of the appeal division were defeated in Parliament. Finally, in 2010, Parliament approved the Balanced Refugee Reform Act (BRRA), which among other provisions stated that the division, and the right of refugees to appeal to it, must be in force within no more than two years. The act received royal assent in June 2010, and the new Refugee Appeal Division was launched on December 15, 2012.

Also in 2012, Parliament passed Bill C-31, also known as the Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act (PCISA), which received royal assent in June of that year. The PCISA amended both the IRPA and the BRRA to introduce new restrictions and regulations regarding refugees. Among other amendments, it introduced strict timelines for processing refugee claims and preparing for hearings; allowed for refugee claimants from certain "Designated Countries of Origin"—specifically, countries that are generally considered to be safe and do not typically produce refugees, to be named at the minister of immigration's sole discretion—to have their claims processed more quickly; required that "irregular arrivals" (groups of two or more, identified at the government's discretion) be held in mandatory detention pending a review; and barred both "irregular arrivals" and claimants from the designated countries from appealing to the Refugee Appeal Board. The government claimed that the Designated Countries of Origin policy was "meant to deter abuse of the refugee system by people who come from countries generally considered safe," and that it would "make sure that people in need get protection fast, while those with unfounded claims are sent home quickly," according to its Immigration and Citizenship website. Critics, including the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), viewed it as "creating a two-tier system of refugee protection" that "emphasizes speed and categorizations over fairness and individual protection," as argued by CCR President Wanda Yamamoto.

Immigration Today

Between 1989 and 2015, the number of permanent residents admitted to Canada fluctuated between about 174,000 (1998) and 280,000 (2010), with nearly 272,000 admitted in 2015. Subsequently, following the election of a Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau in November 2015, immigration target levels increased, and Canada welcomed around 300,000 new arrivals per year—the largest number of immigrant arrivals in a calendar year since the early 1910s—from 2016 to 2018.

Despite the growing number of new permanent residents, the number of immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship began declining in 2015; only around 130,000 citizenship applications were submitted that year, compared to an annual average of 200,000 in the years before. The decrease in applications was attributed in large part to significant increases in the citizenship application fee, which rose from $100 to $300 in February 2014, to $530 in January 2015. (The right of citizenship fee, an additional required expense, remained at $100.) In 2016, the number of citizenship applications submitted fell even further—just 56,446 applications were received in the first nine months of 2016, compared to 111,993 in the first nine months of 2015—and the number of new citizenships granted fell by 48 percent during the same period, from more than 198,000 in 2015 to just under 111,500 in 2016.

In 2011, the Syrian Civil War began, displacing thousands upon thousands of Syrian citizens. By the mid-2010s, the number of people fleeing Syria had reached critical numbers. Neighboring countries in the Middle East and beyond in Europe were struggling to settle all of the new migrants. Canada committed to accepting Syrian refugees seeking asylum; between November 2015 and October 2020, the nation accepted 44,620 Syrian refugees. By 2024, the total reached over 100,000.

In 2019, the number of permanent residents admitted to Canada increased to a new record of more than 340,000. However, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which began in early 2020, immigration to Canada was significantly impacted. While the country continued to accept applications for most immigration programs during the pandemic, the processing of those applications was greatly delayed. Furthermore, Prime Minister Trudeau announced the closure of the US–Canada border and travel restrictions from certain countries with high rates of the virus, including Mexico, India, and Pakistan. As a result, Canada's immigration targets were lower than anticipated during 2020, with fewer than 130,000 new arrivals by August 2020. In October 2020, Canada's immigration minister, Marco Mendicino, announced a plan to increase immigration levels between 2021 and 2023 to more than 400,000 new permanent residents per year to make up for the low numbers during the pandemic. However, immigration surged in Canada from 2021 to 2024, and the number of new permanent residents reached 437,000 in 2022.

Each year, Canada's immigration and citizenship officials meet with stakeholders and partners to determine the ideal number of individuals Canada should welcome as permanent or temporary residents over the next three years. Using information from this meeting, the government sets specific goals for the country's Immigration Levels Plan. For permanent residents, these levels include categories such as family, work, refugees, and protected persons, as well as humanitarian and compassionate categories. These levels help the country control population increases and decreases, which promotes economic and social stability. It also allows policymakers to set goals. For example, the country aimed to transition temporary residents to permanent residents in 2023. To balance the post-pandemic surge in immigration, the country announced in 2024 that they would be reducing the number of permanent residents they would accept from 500,000 to 395,000.

Bibliography

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