In 2012, Canada’s Harper government passed Bill C-31, drastically changing the way the refugee system is run by the Immigration and Refugees Board of Canada. Critics say the bill is making it harder for people from “safe countries” to have their refugee status approved. Does the data prove that theory?
Here’s a video to sum it all up.
Canadian Council for Refugees.
IRB explanatory note.
Bill C-31.
Victoria County legislators want to get rid of tax reductions for seasonal businesses, instead preferring to offer those tax reductions to businesses that stay open all year-round.
They say those taxes should be incentivizing businesses to stay open rather than close prematurely.
Right now, the tax reductions are costing the county about $130,000 a year. It’s designed to help businesses that are closed for at least four months of the year get a 25 per cent rebate on their taxes.
This isn’t a new idea for Victoria County: John MacDonell, Minister of Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations, requested the Seasonal Tourist Business Tax Designation, which was first implemented in 2004, be changed from mandatory to optional in 2011. Mark Furey, Minister of Municipal Affairs once again brought up the issue 2 years ago. Nothing was changed.
Victoria County in trouble
Getting rid of the tax reductions may be putting Victoria County legislators at odds with the very people they want to help.
And help, they may need. According to the latest census data pulled from 2011, Victoria County has the highest unemployment rate in the entire province. Almost a quarter of the people living in Victoria County are unemployed.
Here it is mapped with ArcGIS:
On top of that, a person living in Victoria County will, on average, work only 33 weeks out of the year. In comparison, a person in Halifax will work an average of 45 weeks in a given year. That means a person in Halifax will work 36 per cent more in a year than someone living in Victoria County.
Seasonal work
Pauline Davis, Director of Taxation for Victoria County’s Municipal Office has a rather simple explanation. “Most of the work here is seasonal,” said Davis.
But if most of the economy in Victoria County is based on seasonal business, why get rid of a tax reduction that is going to help them out?
Davis doesn’t see it that way – she thinks the tax reductions aren’t beneficial to the county economy. “It doesn’t help to keep businesses open,” said Davis. “I mean, it helps them with their taxes, but it doesn’t give that incentive to stay open all year round.
It’s more the incentive to close.”
Businesses speak out
Numerous seasonal businesses within Victoria County have expressed the exact opposite of what Davis is saying.
Sheila Van Chaick of Bird Island Boat Tours, a company that’s been around for over 40 years, said the tax reductions “didn’t have anything to do with the decision making” of closing down for the year.
“You can’t really run a boat tourism business in the winter anyway,” Van Chaick said. “We were going to close, tax deduction or not.”
To Van Chaick, it’s more of an added bonus than anything else. “It save’s you a few bucks, and small businesses are hard to keep open anyway.”
Another local business owner, Sharon Harrison from Lantern Hill & Hollow, an inn near Ingonish, expressed similar thoughts on the tax reduction. “It’s not that big of a factor,” said Harrison. “Would I deliberately close down because of this and not stay open year-round? No.”
But Pauline Davis said it wasn’t always like this – businesses used to not close down before the tax reduction. When the legislation was designed years ago, “the businesses did stay open all year round and they didn’t think anything different,” said Davis.
“For the last 20 years… they do their thing from May until the end of October and then everything shuts down.”
For now, the tax reductions will remain in place, but research and investigation into the matter is still ongoing.
Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) isn’t doing enough to prevent citizenship fraud. This is according to the Auditor General of Canada’s Report that came out this year.
The audit found some people were granted citizenship based on incomplete information or without all of the necessary checks being done. In other words, people were able to cheat the system and gain the benefits of Canadian citizenship without going through the proper hoops and channels.
Further analysis found multiple gaps in the IRCC’s ability to prevent fraud: they had trouble checking for problem addresses, they had trouble identifying altered documents, and there was a general lack of communication with the RCMP in regards to past criminal behavior of applicants, which could affect the status of the application process.
Problematic addresses
Lee Cohen, an immigration and refugee lawyer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said he personally has seen people who have falsified information, who have been caught and who are being challenged by the citizenship authorities.
“I have seen one or two common threads in those applications – almost all of those people who have come to see me because they’ve been caught with false addresses used an immigration consultant,” Cohen said.
But more than a few still fall through the cracks. The audit, which looked at roughly 10,000 addresses of just over 100,000 adults who had submitted citizenship applications in 2014 and had been granted citizenship by June 2015, found dozens of problematic addresses at first glance.
The audit sites problems with the IRCC’s Global Case Management System (GCMS), a database for Canadian addresses. The report found that GCMS was not updated consistently.
Moreover, there was inconsistent follow-up on addresses identified as problematic in the database, as well as inconsistent identification of applicants who were using the exact same address as other applicants.
Forging documents
Roya Golesokhi, an Iranian immigration consultant working in Toronto, said many applicants are met with increasing demands by the government. That may be a reason why some are pressured to lie.
“If they correctly respond to [questions] on the application form, they would not be able to gain immigration status in Canada,” said Goleshokhi.
She said many people forge employment and financial documents in order to comply with rules that stipulate immigrants need to divulge where they get their money from. They also try to misrepresent the amount of time they spent in Canada in order to meet the requirements for residency.
“The government doesn’t know when you leave,” said Golesokhi. “The only way they can keep track [of people] is with the entrance stamp.”
Miscommunication with the RCMP
To be eligible for citizenship, an applicant cannot have been convicted of certain offences, be in jail, or be on probation.
Yet when that does happen, sometimes the IRCC doesn’t even check. That’s because there’s a lack of communication between the department and the RCMP.
The audit found once the initial criminal clearance check is completed (very early in the citizenship application process), the Citizenship Program has no systematic way of obtaining information on criminal charges from police forces. This means that if an application is arrested after passing the clearance check, IRCC may never find out.
Moreover, some citizenship officers still granted citizenship to applicants even when they knew they had criminal backgrounds.
Cpl. Jennifer Clarke, media-relations officer for the Nova Scotia RCMP, said in an email that “the RCMP will work with IRCC to address the Audit’s recommendation.”
She said the RCMP will explore how and when the RCMP will share information about criminal charges against permanent residents and foreign nations
Clarke said this work is expected to be concluded by December 31, 2016.
Nova Scotia is virtually heroin free.
This is according to an analysis of data obtained from Statistics Canada.
From 2010 to 2014, the years with the most recent available data, there were only a total of seven arrests made for heroin possession in the entire province.
In comparison, total arrests made for the possession of heroin in Canada during that period was 3955. Nova Scotia sits at just .2 per cent of all arrests with a total population of just under three per cent. In other words, Nova Scotia’s numbers are way below the national average
Diane Bailey, self-admitted ex-junkie and director of Mainline Needle Exchange in Halifax, said heroin was never been a big issue in Halifax and Nova Scotia. “There was little pockets of heroin in the seventies and eighties, but it’s not prominent here,” said Bailey. “This has always been a pill city.” She said one reason why heroin may never have taken off in Nova Scotia is because of the rural nature of the province. It’s true – high population cities like Vancouver and Toronto have some of the highest rates of heroin arrests per capita.
Donald MacPherson, director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition in Vancouver, also believes that regional drug cultures can affect which drugs people use.
In fact, Macpherson’s own province, British Columbia, has the worst heroine possession arrest numbers in all of Canada by a long shot. On average, a person in BC is almost 7.5 more likely to be arrested for heroin possession than all of the other provinces
There are more arrests in British Columbia for heroin possession than all of the other provinces combined. “Part of it is just historical,” said MacPherson. “We are a port of entry, and heroin traditionally was coming from South East Asia.” But while arrests for possession of heroin in British Colombia have continued to climb, arrests for importing and exporting the drug have gone down. In 2014, only five arrests were made for importation and exportation of heroin in BC. That’s down from 13 in 2010.
Canada fighting back
Canada’s war on heroin is getting worse.
Both MacPherson and Bailey expressed concern over the rise of synthetic street opioids such as fentanyl, which is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 40 times more potent than heroin.
The new drug is being blamed for hundreds of overdoses nation-wide by health officials across Canada.
The Canadian federal government has caught on, and it has started to crack down on prescription drugs that could potentially get into the hands of users.
But heavier regulation may come with a drawback.
“With the federal government putting such restrictions on drugs (opioid painkillers), and the amounts that people can have, I’m fearful that heroin would appear here, even in the east,” said Bailey.
In other words, if the government starts regulating pills, people may hop back on the heroin bandwagon.
“Drug use isn’t going to go away,” said Bailey.
MacPherson and the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition echoed that statement, suggesting Canada should take a more humanitarian approach to its heroin problem.
“We’re against the criminalization of these drugs,” said MacPherson, “and we don’t see the real upside in criminalizing the people that use them.
“In order to move to a comprehensive health and human rights approach, you need to remove the criminal law and implement health and social programs to people that need them”