After 500 men, women and children arrived
off Vancouver Island in 2010, some were held for up to a year in prison
facilities
- Bilbo Poynter in Hamilton, Ontario
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 November 2012 21.29 GMT
When
the sea-battered cargo ship MV Sun Sea attempted to reach land off Vancouver
Island on Canada's west coast in 2010 – overloaded with nearly
500 Tamil asylum seekers – its weary inhabitants couldn't have known that they
would soon be used as political pawns in their chosen safe harbour of Canada,
but that's exactly what happened.
The
Canadian government detained the men, women and children of the Sun Sea in a provincial
prison for months – some for over a year – while raising the spectre of human
smuggling and terrorism arriving on Canada's shores in the form of the Tamil Tigers.
"Canadian
officials will look at all available options to strengthen our laws in order to
address this unacceptable abuse of international law and Canadian
generosity," the Canadian public safety minister, Vic Toews, said in a
statement on the arrival of the Sun Sea.
Fast
forward to the present, and the government's response to the Sun Sea may have
foreshadowed justifications for the profound changes now under way in Canada's
immigration and refugee policies through the passage of Bill C-31 in June. It's
an omnibus bill that further turns Canada into one of the only western
countries that detains asylum seekers in prison facilities, according to the
2012 Global Detention Project report on Canada.
Other
than a few beds at Vancouver International Airport, British Columbia, unlike
Ontario and Quebec, does not have dedicated immigration detention facilities.
But like the other provinces, security is contracted out to the private sector.
Nearly
200 male Sun Sea passengers and crew were housed in a makeshift detention area
set up in the yard of the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre; women went to
the Alouette Correctional Centre, and those with children went to the Burnaby
Youth Custody Services Centre.
There
are two passengers still being detained, and two crew members facing charges
relating to the voyage of the Sun Sea; it's been reported that 28 have been
accepted as refugees, 43 have been rejected, and another 23 claims have been
withdrawn.
"For
me it's a complete waste of taxpayers' money, detaining these guys for such a
long time and also the way they treated the children and the parents,"
said Sam Nalliah, a member of Vancouver's Tamil community who has been
supporting the Sun Sea refugee claimants since they arrived.
"One
guy came with his son; he was kept in the Maple Ridge Correctional Centre. They
[the CBSA] don't have the facilities to keep the kids there, so they decided to
keep the kid in the Burnaby Correctional Centre – at that age it can do a lot
of psychological harm to the kids."
"I
see it as particularly problematic that people are detained in facilities that
are designed to be punitive – when in fact, they're not supposed to be punished
at all," said Peter Edelman, a Vancouver-based immigration lawyer who is
representing crew members of the Sun Sea.
'They're operated as prisons'
"Living
conditions at detention centres are like those at a two-star hotel with a bit
of security," said federal Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, during a
House of Commons debate in June.
"The
facility in Toronto was once a hotel; it's now been converted into a prison.
The facility at Laval [Quebec] has always been a prison – it belongs to
Corrections Canada. Certainly in both cases they're essentially prisons,
they're operated as prisons," said Janet Cleveland, a psychologist at
McGill University in Montreal who studies the effects of detention on asylum
seekers.
Speaking
about the privately run Toronto Immigration Holding Centre (IHC) Cleveland
added: "There's high fences topped with razor wire, there's no freedom of
movement within the facility from one section to another, there's surveillance
cameras everywhere, there's security guards everywhere. People are searched
when you move from one area to another."
Toronto
immigration lawyer Aadil Mangalji shares Cleveland's view of the Toronto IHC,
pointing to the bars on the windows, and how men are housed on separate secured
floors from the women and children. Visitors are separated from detainees by a
glass partition, where they talk by phone. "It feels like a jail,"
said Mangalji.
Several
lawyers and advocates for former or current detainees of the IHC stressed that
generally detainees are reluctant to talk to the media for fear of upsetting
their host country, while Nalliah claims that on the west coast some Sun Sea
claimants were instructed specifically not to talk to the media upon their
release from detention.
The
Canadian border services agency denied that claim in an emailed response to the
Guardian.
"Most
of these guys didn't complain about the conditions of the prison or their stay
there. For them their treatment from the CBSA was pretty bad," said
Nalliah, adding, "This batch of refugees has been treated very
shabbily."
