He is to visit the existing detention facility in Laval on Monday.
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In keeping with the objective to ensure that detention is truly a last resort, the government is expanding the availability of alternatives to detention.
The federal government will announce today it is replacing inadequate immigration detention facilities in Vancouver and Laval, Que.
In addition, because there are no dedicated immigration cells in many parts of the country, newcomers are often held in provincial jails or police facilities alongside suspected gang members and violent offenders, the Canadian Red Cross Society’s inspection report said.
The federal government also wants to reduce the use of provincial jails for immigration detention by making “safe, high quality, federally operated facilities especially designed for immigration purposes” more readily available to avoid the “comingling of immigration cases with criminal cases”, the minister said.
There are about 450 to 500 individuals detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act at any given time.
The Red Cross said the border agency detained 10,088 immigrants – nearly one-fifth of them refugee claimants – in 2013-14 in a variety of facilities, including federal holding centres and provincial and municipal jails.
The government will begin consultations with various stakeholders, with the aim of finding alternatives and ways to minimize the number of minors in detention.
Last week’s incident, as well as the attack on Parliament Hill in 2014, have led to an appetite among Canadians to examine current national security measures and look at how they can be improved to better protect Canadians while safeguarding civil liberties, Goodale said.
Among these were at least 197 minors, held an average of about 10 days each.
MEANWHILE, Solidarity Across Borders demanded the closing of all immigration detention centers and said that no migrants should be detained. The funding will also be used to enhance mental and medical health services and support for individuals in immigration holding centres.
Finally the government wants to achieve greater transparency, effective and dependent scrutiny and review of the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), Goodale said.
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The End Immigration Detention Network welcomed the government’s acknowledgment of problems, but it said new laws and policies are needed – not revamped holding centres – to remedy unfairness in the system.
