CANADIAN POLITICS:

EXPOSE BILL C-50:

Last June the federal Conservative government passed, by underhanded means, Bill C-50, a piece of legislation that is inherently undemocratic and anti-immigrant. Tomorrow, July 22, Diane Finley, the Minister of Immigration will be in Toronto to hold sham "consultations" behind closed doors. Supporters of immigrants will be on hand to demonstrate against this farce. The following notice from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) tells it all.

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Expose Sham Bill C-50 'Consultations' of Immigration Minister:‏
*****please forward widely***

PICKET TO EXPOSE SHAM OF IMMIGRATION MINISTER’S C-50 “CONSULTATIONS”

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

11am

Park Hyatt Hotel

4 Avenue Road (Avenue Road and Bloor)

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Immigration Minister Diane Finley will be in Toronto conducting consultations on the implementation of Bill C-50. These so-called 'consultations' behind closed doors at the Park Hyatt Hotel with what she calls “key stakeholders”. Community groups and agencies, such as OCASI and others, have been denied access to these consultations, leading us to believe the only 'key stakeholder' that matters to Finley is big business.

On June 18th, the Harper government passed Bill C-50 even though the majority of members of Parliament opposed it. This was done by slipping immigration changes into a budget bill and then virtually forcing the Liberal Party into abstaining by threatening an election if the bill was defeated. Now the government is holding sham"consultations" about implementing Bill C 50 to give these anti-democratic maneuvers a fig leaf of "transparency" despite the fact that many immigrant and refugee rights organizations opposed the bill from the start.

Bill C-50 is an amendment to the Immigrant and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) that will supposedly address the backlog of applications.Instead, Bill C-50 puts a greater amount of power in the hands of the Immigration Minister, giving her the ability to arbitrarily reject applicants – including putting quotas on applicants from areas of the world she may consider ‘undesirable’. This undemocratic move aims to sneak in significant changes that will perpetuate a restrictive,exploitative, and racist immigration policy in Canada.

Bill C-50 further legitimizes the use of human beings as a form of indentured labour and further legalizes racist discrimination through immigration policy. With Bill C-50 we will likely see more temporary work permit programs, thus ensuring greater exploitation of migrants as they are simply used as disposable commodities to fill the labour needs of corporate Canada, tossed aside as those needs are filled.

We have a better idea:

NO ONE IS ILLEGAL!

STATUS FOR ALL!

SCRAP BILL C-50!

Contact nooneisillegal@riseup.net for more information

VANCOUVER:

TAKE ACTION AGAINST BILL C-50:

One of the national networks that many Canadian anarchists are involved in is the various "No One is Illegal" groups that exist in larger Canadian centres. Links to such groups in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver can be seen over in our Links section. The following is a callout from the Vancouver section. It comes our way via a notice sent by Vancouver musician Joey Only.

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TAKE ACTION AGAINST BILL C-50‏

refuse to be invisible

join the fight

against racist immigration laws

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TAKE ACTION AGAINST BILL C-50

NO TO REPRESSIVE IMMIGRATION CONTROLS!

TUESDAY, MAY 13TH @ 5 P.M.

meet outside BURRARD SKYTRAIN STATION

(corner Burrard and Dunsmuir)

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WHAT IS BILL C50?

/arbitrarily reject/ an immigration application, even if it meets criteria/ have the power to issue restriction quotas on the category and the country of origin of people/ control the order in which applications are processed/ simply hold on to, return or throw out a visa application.

Recently the Conservative government introduced a series of amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act buried in Bill c-50, the 'budget implementation bill'.

This fundamentally undemocratic move sneaks in critical changes to Canada’s immigration policy without proposing any of those changes before Parliament. These sweeping changes will give enormous and arbitrary powers to the Minister around application processing, while perpetuating a racist and anti-poor agenda of setting immigration agendas based on 'labour market needs'. The government is stating that these measures are a solution to the growing backlog by essentially giving the Minister the power to kick people off the backlog/waiting list.

By excluding immigrants based on their country of origin, this Bill reproduces openly racist immigration policies in Canada, like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, the Order in Council of 1911 prohibiting the landing of “any immigrant belonging to the Negro race”, that of 1923 excluding “any immigrant of any Asiatic race”, the “None is too many” rule applied to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe during Second World War, or the targeting and internment of Japanese and Italian Canadians during Second World War.

These proposed legislative changes come in the context of a global capitalist and nationalist reinforcement of labour flexibility as the guiding principle of immigration policy, where migrants are only as valuable as their labour. In conjunction with the Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement, it is clear that the priorities will be relatively wealthy people applying under the skilled worker program and investor classes, as well as increasingly vulnerable temporary migrant workers.

It also means that people who are not deemed “useful” to the current Canadian market are simply not welcome, which would disproportionately affect poor people, elders, children, people with health problems and disabilities, and so called “unskilled” – mostly women – workers. Indeed,the major lobby behind these changes comes from employers’ organizations and business lobbies.

In response to an overwhelming negative reaction to these amendments, the Immigration Minister has recently been forced to attempt to spin these regressive changes, including launching a intense advertising campaign only in ethnic media to help get the bill through second reading within the next week or two!

Join us in an action to call for the scrapping of Bill C-50! Demand justice and dignity for migrants-

No One Is Illegal!

** For a joint statement by No One Is Illegal chapters, visit:http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=696

** For recent articles and other resources on Bill C50, visit:http://noii-van.resist.ca/?cat=13 Organized by:

No One Is Illegal Vancouver

http://noii-van.resist.ca

noii-van@resist.ca