Canada bill targeting refugees feared to signal new era of US-style border policy

The Guardian: “It’s very regressive in terms of refugee protection,” said Idil Atak, a professor of refugee and human rights law at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Atak said the legislation marked an unprecedented expansion of executive power, in terms of information-sharing about refugees between government agencies and the ability to control, cancel or change immigration documents or processes.

One of those changes is that asylum claims made more than one year after the claimant arrived in Canada would not be referred to the immigration and refugee board of Canada, but instead sent to an immigration officer for a pre-removal risk assessment.

Such assessments depend on a single officer reading the file and have a high rate of rejection, according to a recent op-ed by 40 lawyers and legal practitioners in the Toronto Star…