The Decibel - ‘Strong borders’ bill grants new powers to tighten immigration

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Bill C-2, also known as the Strong Borders Act, is one of the first pieces of legislation by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. The 140-page bill proposes a series of enhanced powers for law enforcement and major changes to how the government processes some asylum claims and immigration applications.Sara Mojtehedzadeh is an investigative reporter at The Globe who writes about immigration and refugees. She explains the details of the bill and why the government believes the changes are necessary.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Since Donald Trump started threatening to tariff and annex Canada, we've pledged to tighten our border with the U.S. Now, Prime Minister Mark Carney's government has tabled a bill that proposes to do just that. Here's Public Safety Minister Gary Ananda Sangary. This is about delivering a win for Canada and ensuring that our borders are safer, our communities are safer. And of course, we're responding to some of the concerns that have been posed by the White

House. This new legislation follows an earlier promise made by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He committed $1.3 billion over six years to increase border security, with new helicopters, drones, and surveillance towers. Carney's bill, by comparison, includes changes that would grant the government and law enforcement new powers that some critics are saying go too far.

So today, Sarah Morshtehedzadeh is on the show. She's an investigative reporter for the globe and writes a lot about Canada's immigration and refugee systems. I'm Menaka Raman-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Sarah, thanks so much for being back on the show. Thanks for having me. So Ottawa tabled Bill C-2 last week. This is also known as the Strong Borders Act. What exactly is the goal of this legislation?

Yeah, so it's a pretty sweeping piece of legislation, and it aims to do a number of things. In a word, I guess the goal is to clamp down on cross-border crime as well as to restrict certain types of immigration, particularly around asylum. But essentially it grants police and law enforcement some expanded powers so they will be able to obtain information about electronic service providers without a warrant. It will include some stronger money laundering measures, so it will prohibit some large cash

payments as well as increasing penalties when companies' anti-laundering controls fail. And then it will grant some other policing and law enforcement powers. So for example, law enforcement will be able to gain a warrant to open Canada Post mail, and border agents will have expanded powers to conduct searches of places like warehouses for stolen goods. So we know that President Trump has raised repeated concerns about what he sees as cross-border crime and including the trafficking of fentanyl. We also know that some of those concerns, particularly around the fentanyl, as my colleagues have exposed through their data analysis, are not based in evidence. There is no evidence that large volumes of fentanyl are flowing across the border, but the reality is that we're dealing with a president who

has these security priorities and Ottawa now finds itself in a situation where it needs to navigate that. Okay. You laid out a number of different categories that this bill addresses here, Sara. There's also some specific stuff that it does when it comes to the asylum and immigration process. Can we get into that a little bit? Yeah, there's some pretty big changes that this bill proposes. The most, one of the most significant ones, I would say, when it comes to refugee claims is imposing a one-year filing deadline. So this is something new that Canada has never had before.

And it will essentially restrict folks who are seeking Canada's protection from filing a formal refugee claim after that one-year mark. Okay, before we get into the specifics of that one-year change, can you remind us how things work in Canada these days? Like what happens when someone applies for asylum in Canada? So there's kind of two main asylum routes. One is like resettlement or private sponsorship

when someone is based, for example, in a refugee camp overseas and then they're maybe sponsored to come over here or resettled here. That's a smaller proportion of refugee claims. Most people arrive in Canada to claim protection and then would be required to file a claim with the Immigration and Refugee Board. So the IRB is an independent tribunal that is tasked with adjudicating refugee claims. So what would happen is you would arrive in Canada, you would say I want to claim refugee status, you would be screened by the immigration ministry or CBSA for any security issues, and then your claim would proceed to the immigration board.

And someone who is an independent decision maker with expertise in immigration and refugee matters would make a decision on your claim. And the IRB is really seen as a sort of global model for refugee determination. It's received a lot of praise for its fair and independent decision making over the years. And it's been kind of a leader, I would say, in some ways, particularly, for example, around adjudicating claims that deal with gender-based persecution. So yes, a well-established model for refugee determination, but one that is also currently dealing with a lot of pressures in terms of backlogs.

AMT – OK. So it actually sounds like our system is seen as a gold standard, it sounds like compared to other ones around the world, but as you say, problems especially with the backlogged nature of it. Let's break down, I guess, why we have this system designed in this way here. Why do we guarantee that all refugee claimants get a hearing? So, first of all, just to back up one step, the reason why we have an immigration refugee board is so that Canada can abide by its international legal obligations to protect refugees. And then in terms of granting a hearing, there was a seminal legal case back in the late 1980s that essentially led to the creation of the Immigration Refugee Board.

And that legal challenge essentially resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that Canada cannot turn away a refugee claimant without granting them a full hearing. So that is why we have the system that we have and why refugee claimants do have the right to be heard by an independent decision maker before their refugee claim is denied. Okay, so Sara, you've really laid out then how the system currently works here. Now this new bill that we're talking about, as you mentioned, it does propose major changes to the system.

The first one that I want to talk about is this change that you touched on a little bit earlier about when someone can file a refugee claim in Canada. So what is happening with that? So right now there's no time limit on filing a refugee claim. That kind of mirrors what's in the Geneva Convention which governs refugee protection. There is no time limit contained in that and Canada's system has historically mirrored that. But that would change under these proposals. What it would mean is that retroactive to June 2020, there would be a one-year filing limit on asylum claims.

If you miss the one-year deadline, what happens is you get streamed into what's called a pre-removable risk assessment. So this is a proceeding that is typically being reserved or is reserved for people who are being removed from the country. And it's kind of a last chance saloon before a potential deportation. And it's administered by civil servants at the immigration ministry. And they essentially look at your case and determine whether there is a significant risk that you would be tortured or persecuted if you were returned to your home country because if so that would violate Canada's legal obligations around preventing a persecution and torture.

Okay so essentially if you miss that one-year filing deadline you just kind of get funneled into this other system it sounds like it's a slightly different system. Correct, yes and this system can grant refugee status if it is found that there is a likelihood that you would be persecuted in your home country. Okay. You mentioned retroactive to June 2020. Why that date? So the legislation doesn't make clear why that date has been selected, but Canada's data around people entering and exiting Canada did improve significantly around that time so that could be part of the motivation.

There's just better tracking of people's movement from that period onward. There's also a bit of a feeling that this legislation targets international students. We know that there's been a significant increase around that period of the International Student Program. And there is a bit of a sense that this legislation may be sort of grappling with that reality. And the way that it would work is that if this legislation is passed, say you entered the country in June 2020 as a student, and then this week, you decided to file an asylum claim, you would no longer be eligible to do that at the Refugee Board, you would instead be funneled

into this pre-removal risk assessment stream. Okay, okay, so this is an important example as we are talking about international students here, if you have been here already for a number of years and you decide to make a claim now, if this legislation were to pass, you would automatically be funneled into the separate system then. That's right. You'd be ineligible to file a claim at the refugee board.

So this pre-removal risk assessment, I believe, is what you called it. Is it only going to be used in these cases? Like when someone applies for asylum after a year of being in Canada, that's the specific use case for it? So it'll be those folks who miss that one-year deadline as well as another category of person. This is going to apply to the safe third country agreement. That's the bilateral refugee treaty we have with the United States that essentially requires most asylum claimants to claim protection in the first safe country that they enter. So you can't pass through the United States, for example, to claim asylum in Canada.

Yeah, someone's supposed to claim asylum in the US. They can't cross over to Canada and then claim asylum. That's right. Yeah. And however, there was a sort of exception to that piece of legislation or that treaty that allowed people who had crossed into Canada undetected and remained here for 14 days to claim asylum here. And this proposed legislation would essentially eliminate that provision.

You will instead again be funneled into this pre-removal risk assessment stream. So those category of asylum seekers will also be essentially barred from accessing the formal refugee system. So I mentioned a lot of people might think, you know, maybe it's a good idea to try to speed up these processes, especially if they are as backlogged as you mentioned earlier, right? So why would it be a problem if the government is trying to find these faster ways to deal with these cases?

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone agrees that having a very backlogged immigration system is not good. There's a number of reasons for that. One reason is that it's obviously extremely difficult to live in limbo if you're a refugee claimant and waiting for several years to get a decision. There's lots of research that shows the negative impact on people's mental health as well as their ability to integrate.

The other thing is that in terms of protecting the integrity of the refugee system, which is one of the stated goals of this legislation, when you have a very backlogged system, there is a concern that that then attracts potentially unfounded claims because, you know, people couldn't potentially access a work permit and work while they're waiting for their claim to be adjudicated. So from that perspective, there's concern that these really long backlogs could potentially undermine the integrity of the system. And, you know, the IRB is facing a backlog of over 270,000 claims. So it is a problem. So it sounds like there are some good reasons to try to speed up this process then.

Yeah, I think that, you know, from all quarters, there's a desire to speed up the system and to clear that backlog. I think the question is whether this legislation is going to be effective in doing that and also what is at stake in doing so because there are certainly concerns around how this undermines Canada's commitment to protect refugees. Can we touch on some of those concerns? What are you hearing from people about the concerns here? Because I imagine, you know, we're talking about the

Immigration Refugee Board. This is a little bit different than this other pre-removal risk assessment process that we've been talking about. You know, first of all, the criticism from refugee advocates is that a one-year filing deadline really doesn't take into account the reasons why people file refugee claims. In some cases, people's personal circumstances change. So imagine, for example, you came here from Ukraine in 2020 and two years later, your country has erupted into conflict. You may have a very valid reason to file a refugee claim two years after arriving in Canada. So

the other concern is that the pre-removal risk assessment from the perspective of refugee advocates is really a lesser form of protection. So through that channel, there is the potential that refugee claimants or asylum seekers would be denied status in Canada and returned to their home country without the opportunity to have a hearing. Whereas in contrast, like we talked about, the Refugee Board can't deny claimants without giving them a hearing and that it's already been ruled in court that it would be unconstitutional to do so. So yeah, really concerns around creating this sort of channel of asylum seekers who have fewer protections than they would through the formal refugee determination system.

We'll be right back. Okay, so Sarah, those are the changes that they want to make to the refugee system in this bill. Let's also talk about the changes that this bill would make to how the government would handle immigration applications more broadly. What would we see with this legislation? So one other interesting feature of this legislation is that it would grant the government the power to essentially cancel, terminate, revoke entire classes of immigration applications. Entire classes? That seems really broad.

Yes. And previously they could do it on a case-by-case basis, but they're seeking to expand their power to cancel entire classes, which again has raised a lot of concerns for people who advocate on behalf of immigrants and migrants. Can you give me an example? What would be an entire class? Well, again, I think reading between the lines, this is kind of targeted at international students.

The legislation says if it's in the public interest. So say the government determines it's in the public interest, so say the government determines it's in the public interest to terminate all international student visas, this legislation would grant it the power to do so. But you know again these are very broad powers seemingly. I've asked follow-up questions to the immigration ministry and I'm told that this won't apply to asylum applications, but currently no clarity on what other categories of immigration applications this could apply to. It again seems very broad and you know, could it apply to permanent residency applications?

You know, there's so many categories of applications that the immigration ministry deals with and as it's currently written, it seems to grant the government quite broad powers to terminate those applications and potentially revoke entire classes, again, of certain types of applications. Wow. Okay, yeah, so this legislation would, as you say,

give the government these broad powers to kind of look at whole classes of applications. Do they need to give a justification in order to do this? Is that written into this? Yeah. So this is another area where I asked IRCC, the immigration ministry, how it would be determined that it's in the public interest to cancel an entire class of immigration applications. I didn't receive a lot of detail on that,

but what I was told was that the goal of this legislation is to improve the integrity of the immigration system and improve the government's ability to respond to what they describe as large scale emergencies, security threats, and other unpredictable scenarios. So again, it does seem aimed at potentially tightening up the immigration system, but not a lot of detail on how they would justify what constitutes the public interest and what the checks and balances there would be. SONIA DARA-MURTUGY-MURRAY You mentioned earlier about how international students may be a

group that could be potentially targeted by this legislation. Do we know, Sara, how much of an issue is fraud amongst international students, really? Is there evidence that this is happening when it comes to our immigration system? So what we know is that in recent years, the federal government really expanded some of these temporary streams to coming to Canada, whether it be the Temporary Foreign Worker Program

or the International Student Program. And last year, then Immigration Minister Mark Miller started to raise concerns that after a cap was imposed on that international student program, that there was a significant uptick in asylum claims from international students. And he wrote a public letter stating that there was concerns that those students were being coached by third parties to provide false information to the refugee board. The letter didn't contain information on what informed that statement. I did request data from IRCC on the number of asylum claims filed by international students. And there certainly has been an uptick last year. There are about 18,000 claims filed by international students compared to about 10,000 in 2023.

So the number is increasing. What I haven't been given are acceptance rates, which is really how you determine whether there was a legitimate basis for those refugee claims. So we don't know how successful those claims are. But it's also important to remember a couple of things. I think, you know, I think there is a lot of evidence certainly of exploitation in this system. But first of all, the overall number of asylum claims filed by international students remains a very small proportion of the overall number of students that came to Canada. So it's not a huge proportion of that student body.

Okay, that's good context. Yeah. And the other thing is that, you know, in some ways, I don't think we should be particularly surprised that we saw an uptick in asylum claims given the way that the International Student Program worked. We know that many students were sold sort of this bill of goods that if you get a student visa to come to Canada, you are going to essentially have this pathway to work in Canada and potentially become a permanent resident. And people, you know, went into huge amounts of debt to secure those visas and to come to Canada. And so when the program was sort of quite suddenly capped, you know, I think it sparked

a lot of desperation in the international student community. But yeah, the whole program has certainly sparked a lot of concerns. Yeah, okay. I guess the big question here, Sarah, is how much of a difference are all of these changes potentially going to make here? Earlier, we talked about the backlog that exists within Canada's refugee system. Will these changes in this legislation actually help with that backlog? I think that the concern from refugee advocates is that this legislation might not be as effective. So one of the concerns is that

this will sort of push migration further underground and that the legislation kind of fails to grapple with the real reason why people migrate. You know, migration is often driven by conflict overseas, by desperation, frankly. And so if those channels to protection are restricted, it could increase the likelihood that people seek other ways of setting up a life in Canada and drive that population underground, and increase the likelihood, for example, of, you know, sort of jobs in the underground economy and exploitation in the workplace. Could it alleviate some of the claims made at the IRB? Yes, that's the intention of the bill.

But the way that it's written is that those people who are deemed ineligible for the Refugee Board will be funneled into a secondary system, the pre-removable risk assessment, which currently already has about a year wait, I believe. So will it simply offload some of the wait times that the IRB to a different part of the immigration system? You know, that's the concern from an efficiency perspective. Okay. So it sounds like some advocates say here that these changes might not necessarily

address the roots of these problems then. So what would they say is actually a better solution then to help alleviate the backlog? Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of the common theme that I heard from speaking with experts and advocates is that resourcing is really key. So we need to have the right amount of resources to match the reality on the ground. And it, you know, kind of doesn't matter whether that reality is politically popular or not. The fact is that since 2017, when we saw a huge increase around the world in global displacement, there has been a growing number of refugee claims at the IRB. And so

the amount of funding that the board has received to process those claims has not matched the reality of their volume in claims. So that, from the perspective of refugee advocates and experts, would be a place to start. So more funding, more staff, I would imagine, than before. Yeah, more resources to help process those claims. There's other tools that the government could use.

So for example, during the pandemic, we had the Guardian Angels program, which essentially lifted about 10,000 people out of the backlog at the refugee board who had experience in frontline healthcare and put them on a path to permanent residency because we know that that's a sector that has huge labor shortages.

And so it was sort of seen as a way to both tackle the backlog at the refugee board, as well as deal with some of the labor shortages that we're encountering at the moment. So that's another tool that the government could consider using to really alleviate some of these long wait times. Sarah, before I let you go, I just,

I wanna ask you about the big picture here, because it does seem like this bill could do a lot of things that will fundamentally change our immigration and asylum system here in Canada. And of course, we're in a moment right now where we're trying to get a lot of things done quickly in response to pressure from the United States. But is there the chance that we could possibly regret

some of these changes long term? Well, I think when you look at the overall thrust of the legislation, it's raised concerns in so many corners from, of course, refugee advocates, but also from civil liberties groups. And I think that there is certainly the chance that this legislation would open itself up to legal challenge on several different fronts. You know, Ottawa isn't, I think, in a difficult spot where it's having to renegotiate its

relationship with Donald Trump. But, you know, if passed, this law becomes permanent. And, you know, will Canadians four years down the line or, you know, when there's a change in government in the United States feel comfortable with the permanent changes that we've wrought in the interim. And I think that's the question that both Canadians and our policymakers and elected officials are going to have to wrestle with.

Sarah, it was so good to speak with you. Thank you for taking the time to be here. My pleasure. That was Sarah Morshtehedzadeh, an investigative reporter with The Globe. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.