Practice in this area can be dispiriting at times. Ministerial Relief is required for inadmissibility grounded in the most serious sections of the IRPA -security, violations of international human rights, and organized criminality.
The wheels of justice grind exceptionally slowly in these cases. Not only does it take an extraordinary amount of time for the matter to be determined, the outcome of the case may well depend more on the identity and ideology of the particular Minister than the merits of the case.
Remember the "good old days" when Vic Toews was the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness?
Justice Mosley commented on the “simplistic” analysis of then Minister Vic Toews in deciding to deny Ministerial Relief in Agraira[1]:
[27] I agree with the applicant that in this case, there are concerns whether the Minister’s decision “turned on the simplistic view that the presence in Canada of someone who at some time in the past may have belonged to a terrorist organization abroad can never be in the national interest of Canada”: Kanaan v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2008 FC 241, [2008] F.C.J. No. 301, at para. 8.
[28] Accordingly, the Minister’s analysis could be said to have rendered the exercise of discretion meaningless. As discussed in Soe, above, at para. 34: “It is tantamount to saying that an individual who commits an act described in subsection 34(1) cannot secure Ministerial discretion because they committed the very act that confers jurisdiction on the Minister to exercise discretion under subsection 34(2)”.
That particular Minister was also rebuked outside of the Ministerial Relief regime for refusing to approve a prisoner transfer –a decision that also entailed consideration of Canada’s security interests and rehabilitation of the individual concerned. The Minister’s refusal in that case was mere “lip service” to the direction of a previous ruling of the Federal Court of Appeal; the Minister “simply wanted to punish him”; and it was not possible to understand the “rational basis” on which the Minister disagreed with expert opinion nor was there “any effort” to explain how the Minister balanced the requisite factors.[2]
Well, no matter how dispiriting things may be at present it only takes some perspective to know things could be worse!
[1] Agraira v. MCI 2009 FC 1302.
[2] Lebon v MPSEP 2012 FC 1500 at paragraphs 13-15.
Comments