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CANADA PROGRAM SEMINAR
Unsettling and Resettling Canada
AUDREY MACKLIN
University of Toronto
Canada, like the United States, is a settler society that defines itself as a country of immigration. This is not merely an empirical claim -- which would apply to innumerable states in the world today -- but also a claim that is imbued with a normative hue: Canada asserts its identity as a nation constituted through immigration, which it pursue assiduously through state policy and celebrates in the national narrative. Yet in the last decade, Canadian immigration policy began to drift away from the policies that typified settler societies over the last 150 years, and toward policy tools and discourses more typical of 'old world' European states. (This, of course, was happening even as European states were openly looking to Canada as a model). This is what I call the 'unsettling' of Canada. In recent months, the Canadian government and private citizens have mobilized to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. While the numbers are tiny as a proportion of refugees hosted by front line states, or even relative to those arriving on their own in Germany, Sweden and other EU states, they exceed the resettlement commitments made by the US, UK and France. I will argue that, apart from the practical impact of Canadian refugee resettlement, the mobilization of public and private resources for refugee resettlement signifies a moment of reclamation of a particular narrative of Canada. Engagement in refugee sponsorship can thus be understood as an act of citizenship by existing Canadians as much as a process that will produce new Canadians. This is what I call the 'resettling' of Canada.
Audrey Macklin (BSc. (Alberta), LLB (Toronto), LLM (Yale) is Professor of Law and Chair in International Human Rights at the University of Toronto. She teaches, researches and writes in the area of migration and citizenship law, gender, multiculturalism, business and human rights, and administrative law. She is co-author of the Governance Gap: Extractive Industries, Human Rights, and the Home State Advantage (London: Routledge: 2014) and the Canadian text, Immigration and Refugee Law: Cases, Materials and Commentary, 2nd Edition (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2015). She has published articles in many peer reviewed journals, including the International Journal of Refugee Law, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Human Rights Quarterly, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Columbia Journal of Law and Human Rights, European Journal of Law and Migration, Law and Social Politics, and International Migration Review. She has also contributed to several edited book collections. Prof. Macklin is a frequent commentator in Canadian and international media, and regularly contributes op-ends to a variety of publications. From 1994-96, Professor Macklin was a Member of the Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, where she adjudicated refugee claims. She was also involved in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen detained by the United States at Guantànamo Bay for ten years. In that capacity, she was an observer for Human Rights Watch at the Military Commission proceedings in Guantànamo Bay, and represented Human Rights Watch as amicus before the Supreme Court of Canada in two Khadr appeals. Professor Macklin has also acted as pro bono counsel or academic legal advisor to counsel in several public interest cases, including challenges to withdrawal of health care for refugees, citizenship revocation, and the ban on niqabs at citizenship ceremonies.