On Dec. 22, as Ottawa shut down for the holidays, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced what many in Canada with loved ones in Gaza had been seeking for months: special immigration measures that allow Palestinians with family in Canada to seek temporary refuge here from the bombing, mass displacement, and impending crises of famine and disease in Gaza.
These conditions led Global Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, as early as Oct. 14, to describe Gaza as “one of the worst places on Earth to be right now.”
The policy as announced, however, suffers from serious deficiencies. It excludes the families of Palestinians who are in Canada seeking protection, even if they have already been found to be refugees under Canadian law.
It excludes families of Palestinians in Canada on work or study visas that are by design pathways to permanent residence.
It requires qualifying families who have already submitted and paid for visa applications through existing programs to start over and reapply.
It fails to address eligibility for fiancés, stepchildren, or — a tragically common scenario — nieces and nephews whose parents have been killed in the bombardment.
And, significantly for families who have nothing but the clothes on their backs, it does not waive application and transportation fees as the government has done with other immigration measures.
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Then, on Dec. 28, the government quietly published a shocking policy update indicating that Palestinians seeking safe refuge would be limited to 1,000 applicants. Families and community organizers who have been helping to gather documents in anticipation of this policy announcement have already created a preliminary database of well over 1,000 potential applicants who wish to evacuate family members.
That means Palestinian-Canadian families who are desperate to save their loved ones must now compete against one another in a zero-sum race to be among the first to upload submissions to a notoriously unreliable online immigration portal.
This indefensible limit is arbitrary and cruel. It also reflects an unspoken anti-Palestinian racism that defines anyone from the Gaza Strip as a potential threat, a theme underscored by the minister’s repeated references at his press conference to security checks.
Canada disingenuously justifies these shortcomings by pointing to security concerns and its limited influence over access to the Rafah crossing into Egypt. However, Canada has already supported the evacuation of hundreds of its citizens through the existing process by which it submits names to Israeli and Egyptian officials.
There is no reason to believe that this same process will not work for the loved ones of those already in Canada. Additionally, those who apply through the special immigration measures are subject to the same security screenings as all other visa applicants. Canada can and must urgently issue visas to all those Palestinians who apply for and meet the criteria of an expanded special measures program, and then put their names forward to officials who control the Rafah crossing.
It is instructive to compare this policy to the expansive and flexible 2022 measures that were justifiably enacted to welcome those displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Under that policy, Canada processed more than 1.1 million visa applications, granted more than 880,000 visas, and resettled approximately 166,000 displaced Ukrainians, without requiring that applicants had any existing relationship to a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
Canadian immigration officials have proven that the system can work when the skin colour and religion of the applicants is deemed politically acceptable, as we saw with Ukraine. There is no reason why such a similarly generous program could not apply to Palestinians seeking to flee what many scholars have concluded is a genocide in progress.
We call upon Miller to amend the policy immediately by removing the 1,000-applicant cap and expanding the indefensibly restricted eligibility requirements. We further call upon him to commit to meeting directly with community leaders and advocates to ensure that this policy conforms to Canadian and international humanitarian law, and that it does everything possible to ensure that Palestinian-Canadians are reunited with their long-suffering loved ones.
