Conservatives Plan to Propose Stricter Asylum Rules in Amendments to Border Bill

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner says her party plans to put forward multiple amendments to border security Bill C-12 aiming to strengthen Canada’s asylum process and immigration system.

Bill C-12 was tabled by the Liberals on Oct. 8 and is now being studied in the House of Commons public safety committee.

“I think Canadians want some change in this regard. Canada’s system for allowing and accepting asylum claims is pretty generous,” said Rempel Garner, who serves as her party’s immigration critic, during a Nov. 20 press conference in Ottawa.

“The measures [the Liberals] included are not sufficient to truly modernize and fix an utterly failed system, and so Conservatives will propose multiple constructive amendments to the bill in an attempt to improve the legislation and fix Canada’s broken immigration system.”

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree told the House of Commons public safety committee on Oct. 23 that Canada is making significant progress on border security and strengthening its immigration system, and urged MPs to vote for the legislation.

Anandasangaree said the bill will strengthen Canada’s immigration enforcement as well as help authorities crack down on organized crime, money laundering, drug trafficking and human smuggling operations.

Among other provisions, Bill C-12 gives the Canada Border Services Agency more power to search shipments, warehouses, and goods coming into Canada, boosts information sharing between immigration and law enforcement, gives more tools to law enforcement to combat money laundering, and gives the government more power to decide when an asylum claim is considered nullified.

Bill C-12 also makes it more difficult to make an asylum claim if the individual in question has been in Canada for more than one year.

Rempel Garner said Bill C-12’s “half-measures” don’t go far enough, and that amendments she plans to introduce would prevent individuals from claiming asylum in Canada if they have already passed through Europe or any G7 nation en route to Canada. She also wants to terminate federal social benefits for anyone whose asylum claim has been rejected.

“Somebody who’s failed a review, I think it’s fair that the only federal benefits that they receive is emergency health care and I think a lot of Canadians would agree,” Rempel Garner said, adding that she would be pushing for faster deportations of non-Canadians convicted of committing crimes or who failed their pre-removal risk assessments.

Tories in committee this week pushed for the auditor general to review how spending on health care for successful and failed refugee claimants has ballooned in recent years.

Government data shows spending under the Interim Federal Health Program for basic health services jumped from $27 million in fiscal 2016-17 to $306 million in fiscal 2024-25. For supplementary health services such as physiotherapy, spending over the same period grew from $35.5 million to $456.8 million.

Rempel Garner also said Conservatives will try to tighten the definition of what counts as “serious criminality” under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, as well as stop the majority of individuals from applying for a new pre-removal risk assessment if they already failed the first one.

“I think everybody in Canada, (of) every political stripe, should be deeply concerned with public polling data that shows that Canadians are losing faith in the immigration system,” Rempel Garner said, adding that the blame lies with government policy, not immigrants.

Bill C-12 is a new iteration of the Liberals’ border security Bill C-2, which has faced opposition for provisions around allowing law enforcement easier access to subscriber data and giving the power to Canada Post to open letters without a warrant.

Conservatives had previously successfully amended Bill C-3 in committee, which codifies the granting of citizenship by descent, but the changes were removed when the bill went back to the House. Bill C-3 received royal assent and became law this week.