(this story originally
appeared in the December, 2012 edition of Muslim Link)
By Matthew Behrens
As
major changes to Canada’s immigration system come into effect, one little
publicized set of regulations will significantly impact privacy rights and,
potentially, the future safety of those who wish to visit this country.
Disturbingly, these regulations continue the trend of assigning the presumption of guilt to anyone from
non-European and Muslim-majority countries.
On
December 8, the Canada Gazette
published a notice that biometric data (photographs and fingerprints) will soon
be required for visitors from a list of some 30 countries, including
Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica,
Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, territories governed by the
Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tunisia, Vietnam
and Yemen.
Once
the system is set up in the fall of 2013, it will affect as many as 300,000
people annually, impacting Canadian academic institutions, employers of
so-called foreign workers, students from overseas, and the Canadian tourism
industry. The cost of giving up such personal information will be $85 per
person, in addition to a file held by the RCMP for at least 15 years.
The
government argues such measures are necessary to prevent the use of fraudulent
documents and, in its standard canard, to maintain national security and the
“integrity” of the immigration system. The list of countries was selected by
immigration officials with the assistance of CSIS, the RCMP, Canadian Border
Services Agency (CBSA), and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International
Trade (all agencies with a poor record of safeguarding individuals’ personal
information, trading information with torturers, and mistreating members of
Canada’s Arabic, South Asian, and Muslim communities).
Palestinians, But Not
Israelis
Notably,
the regulations explain “Canadian foreign and trade policy objectives” were considered
in creating this list which may explain why major trading partners such as
China do not appear. Neither does Israel, whose Mossad agents have a history of
using fraudulent Canadian passports to engage in assassination plots.
Some
exceptions are carved out for individuals under the age of 14 or over 79, as
well as diplomatic staff and their families, refugee claimants, anyone coming
to the Pan-American Games, and members of visiting armed forces. The regulations claim this program will
not affect those applying for permanent resident status, but provide no
guarantee that this is where the invasion of privacy ends, for “future steps
for broader implementation may be considered at a later date.”
After
two federal judicial inquiries found that the RCMP was complicit in torture
for, among other things, improperly sharing information on Canadian citizens
that was both false and clearly based on stereotypes arising from racial and
religious profiling, critics are concerned about the agencies and countries
with whom the Mounties will share this vast trove of new data. The regulations
state the Mounties can share with Canadian law enforcement and the United
States under a joint Canadian-U.S. declaration, “Beyond the Border: A Shared
Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness.” That document
states “we intend to work together to establish and verify the identities of
travellers and conduct screening at the earliest possible opportunity. We
intend to work toward common technical standards for the collection,
transmission, and matching of biometrics that enable the sharing of information
on travellers in real time.”
Will
the Mounties share personal information with overseas intelligence agencies in
home countries that could in turn be used to harass, detain, and interrogate
those who have visited Canada? Would questions arise about who was visited
while here, the political opinions of individuals befriended in Canada, which
mosque one prayed at, what the imam said during Friday prayer, what opponents
of the regime may have been saying in Canada, and a host of other fishing
expeditions that are not at all unrealistic given the findings of the
above-mentioned inquiries?
The
government claims individuals worried about such basic civil liberties issues
have no need for concern, as anyone who wants to visit will be informed as to
the “potential uses of their personal information.” But how? Will that not be
like providing those pages of fine print one sees in a credit card application
when one needs a cash advance to cover the rent? Few people who need the credit
read the terms and conditions anymore than it is likely that someone desperate
to get to Canada will be provided a full tutorial of what the caveats mean,
much less an overview of Canada’s history of abusing such provisos.
RCMP Holds Files
This
expanding era of data collection is based on a little-noticed field trial in
which the CBSA and RCMP collected biometric data on some 14,000 temporary
resident visa, study and work applicants in 2006/07. With the Harper
government’s unrelenting rhetoric equating immigrants to Canada with risk and
insecurity, it is unsurprising that this program is now on the books.
“The
fingerprints collected abroad would be sent to the RCMP for storage and would
be checked against the fingerprint records of refugee claimants, previous
deportees, persons with criminal records, and previous temporary resident
applicants before a visa decision is made,” the regulations state, adding that
since Canada does not currently have a biometric screening system, it will
become a target for “bad faith travellers.”
Bad
faith travellers (one wonders, since this is directed at Muslim-majority
countries, the extent to which this is an unintended pun) include “failed
refugee claimants.” It’s a sweeping generalization that fails to account for
the serious decline in acceptance rates that has little to do with the validity
of a person’s requirements for asylum and more to do with poor advice, lack of
an effective appeal, and increasingly narrow parameters in refugee
decisionmaking.
Expanding Surveillance State
In
assuming that Muslim-majority countries produce “bad faith travellers” Canada
is consistent with similarly broad targetting directed at these same
populations either overseas or domestically. Examples of such profiling include
the New York City “create and capture” program, in which police informants
would attempt to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements that could be
used to justify future arrests, as well as the annual targetting by Toronto
police of over 400,000 people during “non-criminal stops,” at which largely
young black and brown-skinned men are asked their names, addresses, where
they’re going, and who they’re with, all of which goes into police databanks.
These numbers are higher per capita than New York City, and are matched in
Ottawa, where racial profiling by police has led to human rights complaints and
a new study that will document the ethnicity of those drivers stopped by
police. (That study will not include pedestrians or cyclists similarly stopped,
and, while likely confirming what most already know, fails to get at the root
of the problem.)
Overseas,
Canadian Forces now collect iris scans of individuals they detain or who “act
suspiciously,” with the view to supporting the work of other governmental
departments. In other words, someone wrongly detained in Afghanistan who later
seeks to come to Canada is already red flagged because they had previously been
deemed “suspect” or of “bad faith”.
(The U.S. military has over 2 million such scans from Iraq and
Afghanistan).
How
lethal does such targetting become? It certainly justifies President Barack
Obama’s signing off on drone strikes, allowing him to claim civilian
“collateral damage” deaths are so low because, as the New York Times reported May 29, Obama’a policy “in effect counts
all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants… unless there is explicit
intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
Canada’s
improper use of private information has led to overseas detention and torture,
and its failure to implement the Arar Inquiry’s recommendations on information
sharing – among other necessary safeguards to prevent the kind of
guilty-until-proven-innocent logic of racial profiling – does not bode well for
those supplying their prints and pictures to a visitor program that, within a
decade, will possess over 3 million files.
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