Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner speaks during a press conference at the Toronto Police College in Etobicoke, Ont., on April 25.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
The Ontario government is adding its name to the list of provinces that have withdrawn from their deals with Ottawa to hold immigration detainees in provincial jails, a practice that has been criticized by human-rights advocates.
In a letter dated June 14, Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner tells federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) president Erin O’Gorman that the province is giving the required one-year notice to terminate its 10-year-old agreement with Ottawa on immigration detainees.
The letter, obtained by The Globe and Mail, does not give a reason for the decision.
Ontario’s move follows the same decision by seven other provinces – Quebec, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba – after a concerted campaign led by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) to end the holding of immigration detainees in provincial jails.
The organizations say holding people on immigration grounds with domestic criminals – sometimes in maximum-security facilities and even in solitary confinement – is “inherently punitive,” harmful to people already suffering mental illness or distress and violates Canada’s international human-rights obligations. They have also raised long-standing issues about the overcrowding and violence prevalent in many provincial jails.
Recent deaths of immigration detainees in custody in provincial jails have prompted renewed calls from an array of advocacy groups, as well as former federal Liberal cabinet ministers Allan Rock and Lloyd Axworthy, to put an end to the practice.
In January, when Alberta announced plans to end its detention agreement with Ottawa, the province’s Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services, Mike Ellis, said jail was not the right place for people awaiting immigration decisions. Last year, B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said the practice didn’t align with his province’s stance on human rights.
Ontario, which receives from the federal government more than $350 a day for each detainee to cover its costs, had said previously that it was reviewing its detention deal with Ottawa. A senior Ontario official told The Globe there are now fewer than 100 immigration detainees in provincial jails. The Globe is not identifying the source as they were not authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
In the CBSA’s most recent quarterly report, which dates from last September, the agency said it had 1,108 people in detention, with 265 of them in provincial facilities across the country. Immigration detainees cannot appeal CBSA decisions on where they are held, nor is there any limit on how long they can be kept behind bars.
The CBSA sends detainees to a provincial jail, or keeps them in one of its own detention centres, in most cases because they are deemed unlikely to show up for an immigration hearing, and otherwise because they are deemed a risk to public safety or their identity is in doubt.
Some are sent to provincial jails because they are too far from the CBSA’s three detention centres – in Toronto, Laval, Que., and Surrey, B.C. – or because the agency cannot manage their behaviour in its own facilities. It has said detention is a last resort.
Between April, 2017 and March, 2021, HRW says, Canada detained 34,000 people on immigration grounds in provincial jails and its own facilities. The organization says that between April, 2017 and March, 2020, about 20 per cent of all immigration detainees, or 5,400 people, were held in provincial jails.
In March, a coroner’s inquest into the 2015 death of a man held for three years pending deportation to Somalia in an Ontario jail recommended that the federal government end its practice of detaining people on immigration grounds and that the province cease holding such prisoners in its jails.
In 2021, HRW and Amnesty issued a report showing that racialized people, especially Black men, are held longer in immigration detention than others. The report also pointed to the release of many detainees during the COVID-19 pandemic as proof that other methods of managing the immigration system are possible.
Ontario’s jail system has been criticized in a long list of reports and inquests going back years. In 2019, the province’s auditor-general warned of overcrowding, violence, the large number of prisoners kept in custody awaiting trials and staff turnover. Ontario pledged in 2020 to spend $500-million over five years improving the system.