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A few months ago, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (who notoriously once stated that “Canada isn’t a hotel”) announced new visa requirements for people visiting Canada from Mexico and the Czech Republic. People from those countries now “have to apply for temporary resident visas in order to visit, study or work in Canada.” The reason? Those two countries are the top sources of applications for refugee status. Kenney’s argument at the time was that “many of the asylum requests are either rejected or abandoned, raising questions about the legitimacy of the claimants’ allegations that they face persecution in their home countries.”

In other words, the Canadian state responded to a high volume of refugee claims not by giving more resources to the people who evaluate the claims, nor by finding better ways to separate “genuine” refugees from those filing false claims, but by making it harder to apply for refugee status — as if the only real refugees are the ones with the resources to get around the arbitrary obstacles that Canada’s immigration bureaucracy puts in their way.

And now we learn that deportations from Canada have increased dramatically over the past ten years — and the majority of those deported are failed refugee claimants:

Figures obtained by The Canadian Press through Access to Information show Canada removed 12,732 people last year — a major increase from the 8,361 who were deported in 1999.

A series of steady increases over the years shows no sign of abating in 2009. By Aug. 25 of this year, 8,999 had already been deported.

Statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency show failed refugee claimants accounted for three-quarters of deportations while the remainder were often removed on criminal or security grounds.

[...]

The government explains the spike in deportations as the logical result of a jump in refugee applications; there were 35,000 refugee claims last year, and the government says the system can only handle 25,000. [...] But the stats cast some doubt on Ottawa’s explanation. Figures obtained from the Immigration and Refugee Board indicate the 35,000 refugee applications received last year is no record.

While the figure represented a six-year high, it was still far less than the 44,000 cases received in 2001 and 39,000 in the following year. While there was an increase in claims in 2008, the government also completed far fewer cases than in the past.

Refugee advocates say the explanation is simple: the government has wanted to deport more people, and has taken steps to do it in recent years.

(I highly recommend reading the whole article, which goes into detail about some of the failures of the current immigration system and the appalling consequences for rejected refugee claimants.)

There’s an interesting bit of circular reasoning at work here. The rationale for the new visa requirements was that most refugee claims are rejected; the implication was that most such claims were made under false pretences. But we know that the people who control Canada’s borders have been intentionally rejecting more applicants as a matter of policy. Then they use the resulting increase in rejections as a pretext to keep more and more people out of the country. It’s a deliberate vicious cycle — and the people who get screwed are the ones trying to escape misery and persecution back home. That’s one hell of a legacy, Mr. Kenney.

When you live in downtown Vancouver, you can’t help noticing what’s on the cover of the Georgia Straight, one of the city’s weekly alternative newspapers. This week’s cover shows Barack Obama and Michael Ignatieff standing close together and grinning at the camera. They look a little bit like old friends at a high school reunion.

It’s a fitting resemblance. After all, as the headline suggests, they’re both “Harvard men.” Obama graduated from Harvard Law School; Ignatieff got his PhD at Harvard and directed the university’s human rights centre for several years before entering Canadian politics (he’s now the Leader of the Opposition).

The Harvard connection is a minor point, but a telling one. Obama and Ignatieff both have ties to Harvard not by some strange coincidence, but because they are both members and representatives of  North America’s political and economic elite. It’s no surprise, then, that there are other, more substantial similarities between the two men on the cover of the Georgia Straight. Politically, they’re both centrists; economically, they’re neoliberals. They’re hawks on Afghanistan, supporters of the War on Terror, and proponents of Western imperialism in general, in the form of what Ignatieff calls empire lite. Neither Ignatieff nor Obama has any intention of questioning the fundamental assumptions of mainstream North American politics.

And we know what happens when you turn those assumptions into state policy. The worst economic crisis in over 60 years. Growing income inequality in both Canada and the United States. The ongoing erosion of civil liberties. Imminent environmental catastrophe. A series of pointless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, with thousands of dead foreigners as collateral damage (the UN counted 2,118 civilian deaths in Afghanistan alone in 2008; anywhere from 100,000 to well over a million civilians have been killed in Iraq since the invasion). Those are the consequences of the kind of thinking that got Obama and Ignatieff where they are today.

It’s become almost boring to see the same old faces in the news all the time, shilling minor variations on the same old policies on behalf of the same old interests. Obama claimed that he stood for change, but he’s already shown that what he really stands for is a ruling class we can believe in. Ignatieff doesn’t even pretend to represent a break with the past. But a break with the past is precisely what we need. I’d say it’s past time for some real change — the kind of change that doesn’t come from men in suits grinning on the front pages of newspapers.

According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate in this country rose to 8% in March, with some 387,000 full-time jobs lost since last October. But the official unemployment rate is a weird and very narrowly defined statistic. It includes only “the percentage of the labour force that actively seeks work but is unable to find work at a given time.” If we add other groups of people that you and I would consider unemployed or underemployed — such as those who have given up looking for work altogether and those working part-time because they can’t find full-time work — the real unemployment rate for March is more like 12.4%. That translates into approximately 1,456,600 people without full-time jobs in Canada.

The real unemployment rate in the United States, by the way, is 15.6%, which works out to more than 13 million people. According to the Center for American Progress, more Americans have lost their jobs in the past year than at any other time since the government started tracking unemployment just after World War II.

Michael Geist has reviewed a couple of recent cases here in Canada (including one I wrote about last month) with implications for the privacy of your online activity. His conclusion: As far as the courts are concerned, your ISP’s terms of service override your privacy rights. When you signed up for Internet service, you agreed to let your provider decide whether to hand over your personal information to the cops without a warrant.

These decisions place the spotlight on the fact that customer privacy on the Internet is not guaranteed by national privacy law. Rather, the law actually leaves the disclosure decision in the hands of the organization that has collected the information, which can choose whether to turn over personal information in certain circumstances without a warrant.

Moreover, most Internet-focused organizations such as ISPs have drafted user agreements in which their customers have consented to such disclosure policies. These cases confirm that courts will typically enforce user agreements regardless of whether subscribers have taken the time to read them.

While most companies are reluctant to publicize their disclosure practices, according to government documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act, the RCMP estimates that 30 percent of Canadian organizations do not reveal personal information to law enforcement without a warrant.

The RCMP estimates did not include specific data on ISPs, but their estimates are borne out by current practices. Bell and Rogers chose to reveal customer information in the Wilson and Vasic cases, however, not all Canadian ISPs would have followed suit. For example, in Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant in an all non-emergency situations.

Privacy hint: If you use Tor, your online activity will be anonymous, even to your ISP. For other tips on how to protect your privacy when using information technology, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense Project.

An Ontario superior court has ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy to subscriber information. If cops have your IP address, the judge says, they don’t need a warrant to get your name and physical address from your ISP.

Not surprisingly, the judge’s ruling is based on a faulty understanding of how the Internet works:

Judge Leitch accepted the arguments of Crown attorney Elizabeth Maguire that the information is similar to what is in a phone book.

“One’s name and address or the name and address of your spouse are not biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state,” Judge Leitch said.

But an IP address is not biographical information. It doesn’t identify me, it identifies my computer on a network. It’s also visible to every website I visit — and the sites I visit, like the books I check out of the library, should be kept private from the state (in the absence of a warrant). Why? Because they reveal a lot of personal information about me, including some information that I would consider no one’s business but mine. If an IP address were biographical information, that would mean you were giving your name and physical address to every website you visit … and I think most people would find that disturbing. Which means there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, quite literally: most people think, quite reasonably, that their online activities should be private.

I wonder how this decision will affect the Conservatives’ forthcoming lawful access bill.