Bio:
Sharry Aiken is an associate professor and associate dean (graduate studies and research) at Queen's University Faculty of Law. She is a former president of the Canadian Council for Refugees and currently serves as co-chair of the CCR's legal affairs committee. In that capacity she has served as co-counsel in a number of interventions before the Supreme Court of Canada – attempting to get the Court to consider the section 15 equality guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the immigration/refugee context – and persistently failing. Sharry has served as a member of the Equality Rights Panel of Canada's Court Challenges Programme and is currently a member of the Legal Aid Ontario's Area Committee on Immigration. Sharry teaches Immigration law, international refugee law, law and poverty, and administrative law. Her current research interests include refugee law and its intersection with the national security agenda as well as minority rights.
Title of paper:
‘Who is Family? A Critique of Canada’s Shifting Immigration Priorities’
Abstract:
Canadian immigration law and policy are informed by competing and often contradictory objectives. Nevertheless, as the text of the law and legal discourse in the area of immigration has evolved from its explicitly racist and gendered origins to objective neutrality, discrimination in less obvious, systemic forms has persisted. Contemporary strategies of pre-emptive exclusion and deportation have served to disadvantage women on the basis of the intersecting grounds of gender, ‘race,’ class, and disability.This paper traces recent policy changes to ‘family class’ immigration in Canada to illuminate the extent to which the terrain of sexism and racism in Canadian immigration law may have shifted while the promise of transformative constitutionalism remains unfulfilled for non-citizens – particularly women. Indeed, it can be seen that the appearance of change – created by using the vocabulary of equity and fairness in the text of the law and law talk – has served as a cover for sustaining systemic discrimination in Canada’s immigration programs.