Ottawa warned Quebec premier that forcibly removing asylum seekers violates the Charter

France's President Emmanuel Macron, right, welcomes Premier of Quebec Francois Legault, for the 19th Francophonie summit Francophonie summit in Villers-Cotterets, France, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024. (Aurelien Morissard, The Associated Press)

Quebec Premier François Legault was warned as early as the spring that the idea of forcibly moving 80,000 asylum seekers did not comply with constitutional obligations, says Ottawa.

"We cannot legally force someone to move to another province (...) they must go of their own free will. This has always been made very clear to Quebec," said a federal government source on Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Ottawa also said it communicated this to Quebec City at the beginning of the summer, before the June meeting between Legault and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss immigration issues, the source said.

Legault, who is on the fourth day of his visit to Paris, has been arguing since Wednesday that half of the asylum seekers already in Quebec should be forcibly moved to other provinces, but he refused to say how he would go about it.

At a certain point in the discussions, the Legault government asked itself: "Can't you just force them, why do we have to accept them?"

"We didn't think he'd go so far as to say that because we thought we'd done the work we needed to do to make them understand that, in the end, it's not possible," the Ottawa source explained.

Already, in a document dating from July, Ottawa stated in black and white that "the resettlement of asylum seekers" must be done on a "voluntary basis" because "there is no legislative power to force the transfer (...) to another province."

To be clear, Ottawa maintains that it is "out of the question" to force the compulsory removal of asylum seekers by invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As for the "waiting zones" for asylum seekers like those in France which Legault mentioned on Tuesday, the source said that the idea of "creating a certain format of centre or camp" had "never come up in any political discussions with him."

Generally speaking, Ottawa would like the Legault government to focus its energies on resolving immigration problems in the areas under its control, such as student visas.

According to data provided by the federal government, four Quebec institutions are in the top 10 of those in Canada where, between January and August, the most people returned on student visas and then claimed asylum.

They are: Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (305), Collège Ellis, campus de Trois-Rivières (255), Université Laval (225), and Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (215).

According to a table prepared by the federal government, there are currently 96,021 asylum seekers in Quebec, not around 160,000, as the Legault government claims.

Ottawa would also like Legault to work to "sensitize" the premiers of the other provinces to accept more asylum seekers.

"We are doing our part (...), but we need to have a collaborative approach," said the source.

He even felt that the Legault government was holding back immigration efforts with its statements because otherwise, we could see "a clear improvement" in the number of asylum seekers.

The Legault government had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication, and the premier, who is attending the Francophonie Summit, was not planning to hold any press events on Friday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Oct. 4, 2024.