Canada-US Border Goes Top-Of-Mind in Ottawa
The second meeting of the Canada-US Cabinet Committee took place earlier this past week. The meeting focused notably on concerns relating to the Canada-US border.
This Cabinet meeting comes on the heels of reports by some of President-Elect Trump’s nominees for senior Cabinet positions this week, highlighting concerns with Canada’s perceived insufficient border controls to the United States. This includes particularly newsworthy comments from Tom Homan, named by President-Elect Trump as his “Border Czar” and who knows the Canada-US border well, having grown up in upstate New York.
Alex Steinhouse from the Government Relations and Political Law (GR&PL) group provides the following additional context regarding the new Canada-US border Cabinet concerns and deliberations in Ottawa.
Mr. Homan, formerly an acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has stated that there is an "extreme national security vulnerability" along the Canada-US border that he plans to deal with immediately once the Trump administration takes over on January 20th, 2025. This means “tough conversations” are to come for Canada with the Trump administration on this issue.
Mr. Homan says that individuals from countries the United States has identified as sponsoring terrorism have been using Canada as a gateway into their country because they have identified the Canada-US border’s porous nature.
US Customs and Border Protection statistics back up Mr. Homan’s statements. US Border Patrol agents have apprehended over 19,000 individuals from October 3, 2023, to October 2, 2024, from 97 different countries, along the border between New York, Vermont, Québec and Eastern Ontario. While paling in comparison to the number of irregular migrants crossing the Mexico-US border, this number is nonetheless more than the total for the prior 17 fiscal years combined.
In addition to Mr. Homan, both President-Elect Trump’s choice for United Nations Ambassador, upstate New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, as well Senator Marco Rubio, his nominee for Secretary of State, have expressed concerns over an alarming
increase in human and drug trafficking from Canada, including many “terrorists and known criminals” crossing into the United States illegally.
It is worth noting that the increasingly lucrative human smuggling business in Canada has also raised public concerns in Canada, with some of the clandestine smuggling voyages having tragically become fatal.
In her post-Cabinet Committee press conference, Deputy Prime Minister Freeland acknowledged the legitimacy of the concerns of the incoming Trump administration and stated that the government will ensure that the Canada Border Security Agency (the “CBSA”) is properly resourced and equipped to securely patrol the border. Previously, the CBSA union has suggested they are already under resourced by up to 3,000 full-time agents, in order to effectively fulfill their duties.
In an earlier press conference, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller provided a similar message to that of Deputy Prime Minister Freeland, agreeing with Mr. Homan that more must be done to secure our borders, and that the government looks forward to the “tough conversations” ahead.
Moreover, in the face of threats of mass deportations of migrants by the Trump administration and concerns over the potential resultant influx into Canada, Minister Miller was clear yesterday that anyone entering Canada will do so in a regular pathway, and the “reality that not everyone is welcome here.”
In a follow up to this, Minister Miller stated that Canada expects the United States to abide by the Safe Third Country Agreement, by which refugee claimants are required to request refugee protection in the first safe country they arrive in, unless they qualify for an exception to the agreement. Any changes to this agreement will need to be negotiated, according to Minister Miller, and this is in the national interest of both Canada and the United States.
This Safe Third Country Agreement conversation must be contextualized with the events stemming from the previous Trump administration, whereby Canada faced an influx of Haitian migrants, starting in 2017, along an “irregular” border crossing at Roxham road in Québec. On top of the logistical difficulties in handling the accommodations and processing of these claims as well as the considerable political headwinds it created for the Liberal government with its Québec and Ontario provincial counterparts, this necessitated a lengthy and complex renegotiation of the Safe Third Country Agreement with the Americans.
Ultimately, the updated agreement under the Biden administration in 2023 tightened the previous rules, which had enabled thousands of asylum seekers from the United States to file their refugee claims in Canada. However, the renegotiated Safe Third Country Agreement still contains exceptions, including allowing anyone who has entered Canada illegally from the US and who has remained undiscovered for 14 days to file a refugee claim in Canada. In addition to the potential exploitation of this exception going forward, both the implementation of the current agreement and any future renegotiation could also face judicial challenges as to their Charter compliance.
These border and immigration concerns are occurring while Canadians are telling pollsters that they are increasingly concerned by high immigration levels, and more specifically, the number of refugees and protected persons Canada accepts. In this light, we should expect both border security more generally and the Safe Third Country Agreement more specifically to become major flashpoints both domestically and with the Trump administration in the months ahead.
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