Canada has built a wall. It may not be Trump’s ugly border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border designed to keep immigrants out, but Canada has such a wall. This wall is in the form of the Safe Third Country Agreement. It is an agreement that can be as inhumane and deadly as the barbed wire and fences.
If the U.S. no longer wants to lead, Canada will, Prime Minister Mark Carney has said. The new cabinet sworn in last week, too, will be expected to lead, the prime minister has said. Well, there’s no better issue to start leading on than the Safe Third Country Agreement.
The Agreement stops those seeking refugee status from entering Canada or the U.S. if they have entered a ‘safe country’ first. Quietly enacted by the Martin Liberal government in December 2004, the Agreement requires refugee claimants apply for refugee protection in the country in which they first arrive, regardless of their final intended destination.
While advocates have long warned that America is no ‘safe country’ for transgender refugees, racialized refugees or anyone needing life-saving health care, Canada has never wanted to offend its best friend to the south, that is until now. And yet, the Safe Third Country Agreement remains.
Lost in the noise of Trump’s annexation and tariff threats is how Canada has utterly failed to respond to Trump’s despicable war on immigrants that includes targeted raids of migrant farm and restaurant workers, cutting funding to non-profit organizations so that migrant children have no one to represent them in immigration proceedings, and paying migrants $1,000 to self-deport.
While a number of countries have issued travel advisories against the U.S. and the Canadian Association of University Teachers have warned their membership against non-essential travel to the U.S., Canada continues to deem the U.S. a ‘safe country.’ When professors with passports are worried about crossing borders and being detained, we must imagine the fear of a trans Latin American refugee claimant and act.
Trump has attempted to erase transgender people from existence like many states have done before him, making trans people even more vulnerable to fatal violence and suicide. With the election of Trump, transgender youth are contemplating leaving their country.
Canadian party leaders and premiers have been fixated on keeping out drug traffickers, calling for stronger border controls, despite limited evidence of this being a problem. The RCMP is now tasked with around-the-clock air surveillance of the border. But this will make it even more dangerous for people crossing borders to reach safety or their families.
Migrants face various dangers crossing the Canada-U.S. border irregularly, including dying by drowning and hypothermia, and detention, including of children.
Defenders of the Safe Third Country Agreement say border guards exercise discretion to ensure the protection of migrants and that exceptions exist that allow some refugee claimants in, like those who have an anchor relative in Canada.
A recent report of a family of four with an ‘anchor’ brother in Canada being jailed for weeks in the U.S. after Canadian border guards turned them away show such discretion and exceptions provide no real protection.
Researchers have tried to document deaths at the Canada-U.S. border. Their research shows irregular crossings have killed at least 38 people since 1989, with 15 of those deaths occurring between 2020 and 2023. However, they note the number is probably higher. American authorities do not publicly report information on deaths at the Canadian border, like they do for deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Dating back to William Lyon Mackenzie King government’s “none is too many” response to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, Canada denies entry to many in danger by putting arbitrary caps on the number of refugees from an arbitrary list of countries. Think Palestine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan.
The Safe Third Country Agreement has survived court challenges on technicalities too many times. The newly sworn-in Carney government has a chance to show human rights leadership and rip it up once and for all.
Tracy Glynn and Aditya Rao are founding board members of the Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre in New Brunswick.
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