Canada benefits from a very positive image on the international stage. It does some great things, and it does some things that are deeply problematic. It is important to see the true story about Canada’s actions regarding migration.
The University of Ottawa Research Chair on Migrant Protection and International Law was established precisely to address this need. Our objective is to inform migration policies with sound data, ensuring that the rights of migrants are truly respected.
Our approach is multidisciplinary, bilingual, centered around the rights of migrants, and deeply rooted in collaboration with various migration stakeholders. This approach helps us ensure that the project is grounded in lived realities, tackles real life problems, and produces practical tools and outputs that help to make positive impacts in the society.
The advantage of bringing together community partners and academic institutions is the rigor and expertise that all of those partners bring to enhance our understanding of the obstacles faced by human rights defenders.
Very little research critically examines the relationship between Canada’s commitments on the global stage and its domestic policies. Our goal is to document two decades of migration policies in Canada and to understand how these policies impact, or have impacted, migrants — their rights, their protection, their journeys, and their access to a safer status.
In the case of human rights defenders, these are crisis situations where rapid action is needed. There are also people who sometimes want to return to their country once the crisis is over. The current asylum or refugee system is not suited to their type of situation. We want to analyze what has already been done, both the successes and the shortcomings. The goal is to identify and propose concrete solutions to the Canadian government that are adapted not only to our immigration system but also to the realities faced by human rights defenders.
Essentially what my thesis does is ask a deceptively simple question: “What do bilateral labor agreements do beyond what they claim to do?” My project matters because it unsettles the dominant win-win narrative in labor migration dominance. It places at the center of the conversation questions of migrant worker protection and how international law could manage inequality rather than dismantle it.
For me, it is a very important conviction that all migrants must have fundamental rights and protections. There is often a tendency to assume that certain things can be done to migrants simply because they are not citizens. But history has shown that the rights of minorities must be protected. Why? Because if we don’t protect them sufficiently, ultimately, citizens’ rights will also be eroded.
