OTTAWA, March 27, 2026 – A broad coalition of human rights, civil liberties, refugee and migrant rights, gender justice, and data privacy organizations have denounced the adoption of Bill C-12, which became law yesterday. This egregious bill marks a significant attack on refugee and migrant rights in Canada, and has been criticized by the UN Human Rights Committee for undermining critical procedural safeguards for refugees.

Bill C-12, otherwise known as the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, sets the current and future governments on a dangerous path by limiting the ability to seek refugee protection in Canada, enabling the mass cancellation of immigration documents and applications, and facilitating the sharing of personal information within and outside the country. Bill C-12 will put thousands of individuals at risk of persecution, violence and precarity.

Civil society organizations have consistently demanded the withdrawal of this dangerous legislation, including when over 300 organizations urged the government to withdraw Bill C-2, its predecessor, in June 2025. However, these concerns were ignored, and these groups were largely excluded from the legislative process in the House of Commons.

After a broad range of experts and individuals with lived experience appeared in the Senate to underline the harmful effects of Bill C-12, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology recommended deleting parts of Bill C-12 that would make changes to immigration and refugee protection laws, due to human rights, privacy and due process concerns. However, these recommendations were ignored, and no significant amendments were made as the government fast-tracked this deplorable piece of legislation.

This government is replicating US-like anti-migrant sentiment and policies in Canada. As we look ahead, we are concerned about the dangerous trend towards discretionary power and the further erosion of refugee and migrant rights slated in future legislative and policy reforms, including imminent changes to the Interim Federal Health Program coming into effect on May 1st.

As a coalition, we will continue to fight back against this attack on refugee and migrant rights in Canada when refugees and migrants are scapegoated for the crises that governments at all levels have created.

For media inquiries:

• Karen Cocq, Migrant Rights Network: 647-970-8464, karen@migrantworkersalliance.org
• Gauri Sreenivasan, Canadian Council for Refugees: media@ccrweb.ca, 613-852-0983
• Aaden Pearson and Tamir Israel, Canadian Civil Liberties Association: media@ccla.org
• Tim McSorley, International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group: 613-241-5298, nationalcoordination@iclmg.ca
• Louis-Philippe Jannard, Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes (TCRI): 438-868-5837
• Cory Ruf, Amnesty International Canada, English Section: media@amnesty.ca

Signatories:

• Action Réfugiés Montréal
• Amnesty International Canada, English Section
• Amnistie internationale Canada francophone
• Ansari Immigration Law
• Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers
• Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA)
• Canadian Council for Refugees
• Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association
• Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC)
• Canadian Union of Public Employees
• Clinique pour la justice migrante – Migrant justice clinic
• Community Legal Services of Ottawa
• Council of Canadians – Ottawa Chapter
• Doctors of the World Canada
• International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group
• Jafari Law
• Journey Home Community
• Leadnow
• Matthew House Refugee Services, Toronto
• Migrant Rights Network
• National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE)
• Rainbow Refugee
• Refugee Lawyer’s Association
• Solutions Justes – MCM
• Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes (TCRI)
• The Refugee Centre
• The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF)
• Uganda Community Centre Canada (UCCC)

PCAI website banner

On March 23, 2026, the ICLMG made a submission to the People’s Consultation on Artificial Intelligence. The PCAI was launched by a group of 160 civil society organizations, including the ICLMG, in response to the federal government’s woeful track record on public consultations regarding artificial intelligence policy and regulations, specifically its Fall 2025 30-day “national sprint” consultation on AI. The submissions will be sent to the Canadian government in the following weeks.

To read our full submission, click here.

Excerpt: Concerns and recommendations

Overarching concerns

Through our work, we have documented how a lack of regulation of artificial intelligence tools and how they are used can have significantly negative impacts on the rights and livelihoods of people in Canada and internationally. This includes its use to power surveillance tools, to profile individuals, to attempt to predict unlawful activity or to make potentially life-altering decisions in a wide-range of sensitive areas, including employment, immigration, border security, law enforcement, and intelligence gathering. We are particularly aware of the interest among government, law enforcement and intelligence agencies to harness AI tools, and to work with private contractors developing those tools, for counter-terrorism and national security purposes. We’ve seen how AI models are inaccurate, biased, and misleading. A study from September 2025 shows that every AI model of every major AI company deliberately lies to users: OpenAI Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, and Meta’s Llama all showed the same deceptive behavior. The paper seems to suggest that it’s unclear if safety training actually stops deception, or just teaches AI to hide it better.” We have also seen how such tools can be used to violate fundamental rights and can either be shared with, sold to, leaked, or stolen by a wide range of actors who can use the tools for their own nefarious purposes. Given all this, we are acutely aware of the need to regulate the development and use of AI tools in the private and public sectors.

We believe that the government should bear in mind the following concerns and principles in developing any further legislation or regulations to govern the use of AI overall, and specifically in the areas of national security and law enforcement.

Specific areas of concern:

A. Regulation of AI must be grounded in human rights, Charter rights and international human rights law

B. Definitions

I. AI legislation should clearly define terms and categories (such as high impact systems)

II. Definition of harms must include group-based harms

C. The government must develop AI legislation that includes regulations for the national security-related use of AI in both the public and private sectors

D. Need for more consultation

E. Need for independent oversight and review

F. Banned uses of AI

Recommendations

1. AI regulation must be grounded in a human rights-first approach, should include human rights-based assessments, and ensure that rights protections are built into the legislation, especially protection of privacy rights.
2. AI legislation should take an approach that addresses the roots of AI companies’ algorithms and business models and their significant human rights implications.
3. AI legislation should clearly define terms and categories (such as high impact systems). Those definitions should not be left to regulation nor to “people responsible for AI systems.”
4. Definition of harms must include group-based harms.
5. AI legislation should apply to both the public and private sectors, including government national security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies; and there should be no exemption in AI regulations for national security related technology.
6. The government must hold open, inclusive and meaningful consultations, before and after tabling legislation, with a broad range of stakeholders and the public.
7. The consultations should not be led by the Minister of AI or the Ministry of Industry.
8. The enforcement of AI regulations should fall to an independent regulator, and AI regulations should be periodically reviewed for effectiveness and impact, especially given that AI technology, and its usage, will continue to evolve.
9. The government should, via legislation, establish a list of banned uses of AI, with the possibility of adding more banned uses by regulation. We recommend that the initial list include:

• • deploying subliminal, manipulative, or deceptive techniques to distort behaviour and impair informed decision-making;
  • exploiting vulnerabilities related to age, disability, or socio-economic circumstances to distort behaviour;
  • biometric categorisation systems inferring sensitive attributes (race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, or sexual orientation)
  • social scoring, i.e., evaluating or classifying individuals or groups based on social; behaviour or personal traits, causing detrimental or unfavourable treatment of those people;
  • assessing the risk of an individual committing criminal offenses solely based on profiling or personality traits;
  • compiling facial recognition databases by untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage;
  • inferring emotions in workplaces or educational institutions;
  • ‘real-time’ remote biometric identification (RBI) in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement.
  • decision-making regarding people’s lives (immigration status/removal orders, social benefits, health-related decisions, etc.).
  • decision-making regarding the deployment and/or the control of autonomous weapons.

To read the rest of our submission, click here.

Khaled Al-Qazzaz, CMPAC’s Executive Director, presents ICLMG’s Tim McSorley with their Community Partner Award.

During the recent Parliamentary Iftar dinner hosted by the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC), Tim McSorley, our National Coordinator, was honoured to receive the Community Partner Award for his dedicated partnership and steadfast contributions in service of the Muslim community.

We are deeply touched to receive this award, immensely grateful for the important advocacy of CMPAC (a member of the ICLMG coalition), and looking forward to continuing our partnership of defending the civil liberties of the Muslim community and of all people in Canada.

Thank you!

Tim McSorley’s statement on social media:

Last week, I had the honour of attending the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Parliamentary Iftar. It was wonderful to sit down to break bread with friends, colleagues, MPs and senators, and members of the broader Muslim community – many of whom I knew and had deep respect for the work that they do in their communities and across Canada to uphold justice and build togetherness. Something we desperately need right now.

So it was incredibly humbling to be recognized with CMPAC’s Community Partner award that night, for the work that I do with the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group to defend civil liberties in Canada from the impact of national security and anti-terrorism laws, including confronting systemic racism, Islamophobia and racial and religious profiling. It was particularly meaningful to be recognized, given how many organizations and individuals have been doing incredible, tireless work at a particularly difficult time, when we see rising instances of hate, racism and xenophobia both in Canada and internationally. I also can’t talk about the work of the ICLMG, and would never be in a position for this kind of award, if it weren’t for the incredible work of my colleague, Xan Dagenais, ICLMG’s research and communications coordinator.

My award followed wonderful and thoughtful remarks from Imam Sikander Hashmi, Executive Director, Canadian Council of Imams, and MPs Salma Zahid and Jenny Kwan, who both were also presented with awards. It inspired me to think about the importance of coming together and working collectively for peace and justice, and how that is also reflected in the ICLMG coalition, bringing together organizations from across sectors, including human rights, legal, faith based, environmental, labour and humanitarian groups. It allows us an opportunity to share across sectors and communities, to learn from each other, to build and show solidarity and to take on difficult issues in a thoughtful way, but also in a way that no one group could do on its own. This includes work like addressing systemic racism in the treatment of Muslim-led charities and humanitarian organizations, the push for greater border securitization at the expense of protecting and welcoming migrants and refugees, addressing the secretive and rights-violating tools used by national security agencies, and confronting the genocide in Gaza and Canada’s complicity in that and other human rights abuses around the world.

I’m incredibly thankful to CMPAC for the recognition, and humbled, but also energized to continue working together. And grateful to CMPAC for bringing us together and the work they do for justice, peace and a better Canada and world. Ramadan Mubarak!