Organizations across sectors reiterate call for complete withdrawal of both bills

OTTAWA, October 9, 2025 — A broad coalition of civil liberties, data privacy, refugee and migrant rights, and gender justice organizations strongly opposes the government’s introduction of Bill C-12, which seeks to fast track, rather than address, many aspects of Bill C-2’s myriad problems. Civil society organizations are reiterating their call for a full withdrawal of both bills, including the egregious expansion of surveillance powers that remain in Bill C-2, and the immigration provisions that restrict access to protection and expand mass status-cancellation now included in Bill C-12.

“Bill C-12 does not fix Bill C-2; it fast tracks some of the most egregious aspects, while still moving forward with the rest,” said Tim McSorley, national coordinator of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG). “Our government has made it abundantly clear that they will continue to fight for every privacy-violating measure Bill C-2 still contains, and are only introducing Bill C-12 to get restrictions on migrant and refugee rights adopted sooner.”

“The story of this legislative package is the same today as it was on day one of Bill C-2’s introduction; it’s about pleasing President Trump,” said Matt Hatfield, Executive Director of OpenMedia. “Canadians reject this multi-layered concession of our rights and freedoms to American pressure, and we expect lawmakers to resoundingly vote against both bills.”

In June 2025, over 300 organizations—including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the BC Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Labour Congress, the United Church of Canada, the Migrant Rights Network, the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International, OpenMedia, Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, la Ligue des droits et libertés, HIV Legal Network, Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, Refugee Lawyers Association, Climate Action Network Canada, the Centre for Free Expression, the Canadian Muslim Lawyers’ Association and the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council—came together to call for a full withdrawal of Bill C-2. Across sectors, concerned organizations and experts have condemned the bill, including legal scholars, migrant and refugee rights organizations, advocates against gender-based violence, immigrant services organizations, and national and international cybersecurity experts.

“The government is trying to skirt around the overwhelming opposition to C-2 by repackaging it as something new. But C-12 leaves intact the measures to block refugee hearings, impose arbitrary retroactive one-year bars, and grant ministers mass immigration status-cancellation powers,” said Karen Cocq, spokesperson for the Migrant Rights Network, pointing to concerns raised by many other migrant rights organizations, including the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, OCASI and others about violations of refugee law and due process. “Prime Minister Carney is showing that his government continues to be aligned with Conservative Trump-like anti-migrant sentiment. But civil society groups remain united in rejecting this agenda and calling for the withdrawal of both bills.”

“Survivors of gender-based violence are uniquely harmed by arbitrary timelines and restricted pathways in immigration, which deny survivors the ability to seek protection when they most need it,” said Anuradha Dugal, Executive Director of Women’s Shelters Canada, joined by other organizations working to prevent violence against women including the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, and others. “Any changes to C-2 that do not remove the immigration provisions will continue to put vulnerable women at risk.”

Bill C-12, An Act respecting certain measures relating to the security of Canada’s borders and the integrity of the Canadian immigration system and respecting other related security measures, retains an enforcement-first approach to drug policy, ignoring decades of evidence showing that criminalization and prohibition are driving the current toxic unregulated drug crisis. “Bill C-12’s accelerated scheduling will trigger faster illegal drug market innovations, making Canada’s already-lethal unregulated drug supply even more volatile,” said Nick Boyce of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. “This legislation will make the toxic unregulated drug crisis worse while wasting resources that should go to the things we need, like housing, healthcare, and harm reduction.”

TAKE ACTION

About:
Joint letter: Over 300 Organizations Unite to Demand Complete Withdrawal of Bill C-2
Global Encryption Coalition: Bill C-2 Strong Borders Act
Open letter from legal scholars
Open Letter: Canada puts refugee claimants at risk with Bill C-2
Statement: Bill C-2 Risks Undermining Canada’s Commitments to Gender-Based Violence Survivors
Open Letter – The Strong Borders Act and its Harm to People Living with HIV and Other Marginalized Communities

More information:
Karen Cocq, Migrant Rights Network, 647-970-8464, karen@migrantworkersalliance.org
Matt Hatfield, OpenMedia, 1 (888) 441-2640 ext. 0, matt@openmedia.org
Tim McSorley, International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, (613) 241-5298,
nationalcoordination@iclmg.ca
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, Women’s Shelters Canada, (613) 462-2723, kbardswich@endvaw.ca
Nick Boyce, Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, (416) 948-0092, Nicholas_Boyce@sfu.ca

October 4, 2025 Ottawa protest against the genocide in Gaza. Credit: Brent Patterson

Today marks two years of the genocidal campaign by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, in the name of fighting terrorism. An estimated 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, with total casualties estimated by the former chief of the Israeli Defence Forces to be more than 200,000. Of those killed, almost a third are children. Many more are dead, buried under the rubble.

That is in addition to more than 100 years of colonization, occupation, apartheid regime and oppression faced by the Palestinian people in the wake of the Balfour Declaration and the founding of Israel.

As a coalition that came together in 2002 to protect and promote human rights in the context of the so-called ‘war on terror’, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG) reiterates its opposition to human rights violations, violence against civilians and the curtailing of fundamental freedoms.

It is appalling and unacceptable that Canada continues to be complicit in Israel’s genocide despite the opposition of a majority of Canadians to the federal government’s actions.

The Canadian government has continued to lie to Canadians by saying it is no longer allowing arms to be sent to Israel, despite a recent damning report exposing the hundreds of shipments and hundreds of thousands of bullets sent to Israel.

The last year has seen mounting criminalization of Palestinian solidarity. Samidoun, also known as the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, was added to the list of “terrorist entities,” in a move that many have denounced as an attempt to intimidate the entire Palestine solidarity movement with threat of criminalization.

For the last two decades, the ICLMG has called for the terrorist entities list to be abolished given that it is, among many other things, a discretionary, politicized, and due process-violating instrument.

The ICLMG also denounces the smear campaigns, surveillance, harassment, fining and criminalizing of people, in Canada and abroad, for expressing support for the rights of Palestinians, and their opposition to Israeli occupation and the ongoing genocide. In particular, we condemn the conflation of Charter-protected expression and dissent with “support for terrorism,” the violent arrests of peaceful protestors, and the adoption or consideration of “bubble zone” laws in multiple cities across Canada, which ban or limit protests across vast areas of cities, violating freedom of assembly.

Thankfully, many of the fines and charges against anti-genocide protesters have been dropped or their cases have been resolved without convictions, including against Ottawa protesters for using megaphones and the Toronto Indigo 11. Their lives were severely disrupted, though, most likely leading others to think twice before exercising their right to peaceful dissent. More than 133 pro-Palestine protesters have been charged since 2023. Many charges are still pending; the rest have ended in withdrawals or discharges.

Instead of addressing the over-policing of protests, though, the federal government recently introduced Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which will give police discretionary powers to determine what symbols are hateful and to discern protestors’ intentions. Passing this legislation would criminalize dissent, violate freedom of assembly and chill free expression. This bill is one more attempt to criminalize pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protesters, and must be withdrawn.

One year later, we are dismayed that we must reiterate our 2024 calls to action:

• Canada must enact a two-way embargo on arms transfer and stop all military support to Israel (including support via the US).
• Canada must stop considering all Palestinians as potential security threats, welcome the Gazan families of Palestinian Canadians accepted through the “emergency” program, and reopen the program to process more applications to save more lives before it’s too late.
• Canada must meet its obligation under international law to do everything in its power to stop the genocide.

The ICLMG remains steadfast in its mandate and commitment to protect civil liberties in the context of the so-called war on terror and its legacy, which includes the genocide in Gaza and the repression of people taking action and calling for an end to the ongoing violence and human rights violations.

The ICLMG is a national coalition of Canadian civil society organizations that was established in the aftermath of the rushed adoption of the Anti-terrorist Act of 2001. The coalition brings together 45 NGOs, unions, professional associations, faith groups, environmental organizations, human rights and civil liberties advocates, as well as groups representing immigrant and refugee communities in Canada.

Oct. 2, 2025, OTTAWA — A newly released report from a national security watchdog  largely confirms what research from civil liberties advocates had long demonstrated: that the Canada Revenue Agency’s approach to countering terrorist financing, including its targeting of Muslim-led charities in Canada, is deeply flawed. lacks rigour, and raises substantial concern of both bias and discrimination. This includes findings that deficiencies in the approach of the CRA’s Review and Analysis Division (RAD) place it at risk of breaching the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“For years, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG) has sounded the alarm that Muslim charities in Canada were being disproportionately targeted by the CRA’s Review and Analysis Division (RAD). We produced the first data and analysis showing the systemic bias that charities faced,” said Tim McSorley, national coordinator of the ICLMG. “Today’s report from the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) supports those findings.”

In 2021, the ICLMG published “The CRA’s Prejudiced Audits: Counter-Terrorism and the Targeting of Muslim Charities in Canada”, which raised many of the concerns addressed in NSIRA’s report. A central recommendation in the report was for NSIRA to review RAD’s activities. NSIRA’s report can be accessed here.

In its findings, the review body explained that RAD’s audit selection process demonstrated a profound lack of rigour, including a failure to adequately document the reasons for initiating audits of Muslim-led charities, use of dated information in their evaluations, and a reliance in some cases on guilt by association (despite a lack of underlying evidence). While all these raised concerns of bias and discrimination, the lack of documentation made it impossible for NSIRA to reach an informed conclusion. “Despite NSIRA’s not being able to formally conclude discriminatory practices that violate Charter protections, taken together with the documented experiences of Muslim charities as well as the findings of other research reports, the review body’s findings should leave no question that RAD’s approach is mired in bias and prejudice,” said McSorley.

“The recommendations in the report — from collecting demographic data, to validating risk indicators, to formally documenting audit decisions — are consistent with what ICLMG has been calling for. The CRA and the Government of Canada must address the unintended consequences of its practices,” McSorley added.

To do so, the ICLMG is calling on the government to immediately:

• Implement independent oversight of the CRA’s activities
• Thoroughly reform the CRA’s approach to countering the risk of terrorist financing in the charitable sector, including implementing the recommendations in the NSIRA report
• Abolish the CRA’s Review and Analysis Division

If the CRA is truly committed to protecting the charitable sector from terrorism financing risks, its actions must be fact-based, transparent, and accountable, and carried out in a manner that does not stigmatize charities, especially Muslim charities, or undermine their vital work.

Key concerns highlighted in the NSIRA’s report include:

• Despite the CRA and RAD maintaining that only those charities at the highest risk of terrorist abuse are subject to RAD audits, the NSIRA report found that a lack of rigour in RAD’s approach led to audits of organizations that did not in fact present credible risk of terrorist abuse (page 5). This reflects ICLMG’s earlier findings that RAD’s audits are not tethered to credible risks. It also raises serious concerns around bias and accountability in the CRA and RAD’s operations that have had significant negative impacts on Muslim-led charities, Muslim communities in Canada and the charitable sector as a whole.
• NSIRA determined that terrorist financing risks identified by RAD, which were used to justify intrusive audits, were only infrequently validated through the audits themselves. In other words, charities were subjected to years-long audits based on weak or unsubstantiated claims, as was demonstrated in ICLMG’s original research. (page 18)
• NSIRA found that RAD’s category of “high-risk jurisdictions” was applied so broadly that it could capture virtually all Islamic charities. NSIRA also identified the use of dated information, and the use of apparent “associations” between certain organizations (despite the underlying risk not being substantiated) as other areas of concern. This demonstrates how neutral-sounding criteria can have a discriminatory effect. (pages 18, 19 and 21)
• According to NSIRA, RAD’s own draft post-audit assessments were often critical of its decision to engage an audit in the first place, showing that many audits lacked sufficient justification or credible evidence. (page 19)
• RAD could not present any information to justify the discrepancy in severity of outcomes between their audits and those conducted by the CRA’s Compliance Division, raising questions of fairness in the application of penalties. (page 26)
• NSIRA’s findings support ICLMG research that the majority of charities that faced RAD audits come from the Muslim community and other racialized groups, determining that from 2009 to 2022, 67% of those charities audited were discernibly Islamic, and another 19% were Sikh. (page 13)
• This overwhelming focus on specific communities, combined with the lack of hard data to substantiate the determination of which charities pose a risk of terrorist abuse, led NSIRA to raise significant questions about whether RAD and the CRA are in breach of their Charter obligations to not engage in discriminatory actions. As NSIRA writes, “RAD’s decision-making, especially when it impacts Charter rights like freedom of religion, must be reasonable. Reasonableness requires proportionality, and proportionality requires data.” (page 5)

More information:

Tim McSorley
National Coordinator, ICLMG
(613) 241-5298
national.coordination@iclmg.ca