Refugee/Migrant Crisis

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One in five recent Canadian immigrants lived below poverty line in 2022, says StatCan
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Sarah Smellie
Published Feb 06, 2025 • Last updated 2 days ago • 3 minute read

The number of visits to Toronto's food banks is now higher than the entire population of the city.

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — One in five recent immigrants lived below the poverty line in Canada in 2022, and most of them were in “deep poverty,” according to a report Thursday from Statistics Canada.


The report studied rates of deep poverty across large sections of the Canadian population, and found it prevalent among recent immigrants, people with disabilities, one-parent families and single people who don’t live with family.

StatCan says a family or a person lives in poverty if they can’t afford the cost of a basket of goods and services that represents a basic standard of living. They are in deep poverty if their income falls below 75 per cent of that threshold.

“This confirms what front-line organizations have been witnessing for years,” said Janet Madume, executive director of the Welland Heritage Council and Multicultural Centre in Ontario.

“Poverty among immigrants is not a personal failure, it’s a systemic failure,” she said. “And without intervention, it’s going to constantly worsen.”


Among the provinces, the report found that Nova Scotia had the highest rate of poverty, with 12.5 per cent of the population in 2022 unable to afford the basic basket of goods. British Columbia had the second-highest poverty rate at 12.2 per cent, followed by Manitoba at 11.9 per cent, and Newfoundland and Labrador at 11.4 per cent.

Meanwhile, 6.9 per cent of people in Manitoba lived in deep poverty, which is the highest rate among the provinces.

In other demographics, nearly a quarter of one-parent families lived in poverty, and 10 per cent lived in deep poverty.

About 60 per cent of Canadians below the poverty line lived with a disability, the report said.

Almost half of Canadians in poverty — 46.1 per cent — were on their own, outside of an “economic family,” defined as a group of two or more people related by blood, marriage or other legal arrangement such as common-law marriage.


Josh Smee, chief executive of non-profit Food First Newfoundland and Labrador, said single, working-age adults are often left out of poverty-alleviation measures, often for political reasons. Relief programs directed specifically toward single working-age adults may not be as popular with the public as those for other groups prone to food insecurity or poverty, such as single parents or people with disabilities, he said in a recent interview.

“There’s a real challenge in addressing the same issues with single folks, especially working-age single folks, because you risk that ’They should just get a job’ pushback, which obviously oversimplifies the situation,” Smee said.

However, he noted there is wide public support for policy changes that would address poverty among most groups — including single people — such as increasing benefit programs and minimum wages. “People are very supportive of those kinds of interventions _ maybe more so than decision makers,” he said.


Wide-reaching policy changes to increase incomes for everyone would also help alleviate some poverty among immigrants and other newcomers, said Madume. But recent immigrants still face a unique set of barriers, including systemic racism. Many arrive in Canada with years of professional experience and qualifications that aren’t recognized by employers or institutions, she said.

Often, the only jobs available are low-wage, precarious positions or gig work. And like the rest of Canadians, new immigrants must grapple with housing shortages, rents outpacing incomes and a lack of policies to alleviate those pressures, such as rent control, she said.

Madume said more disaggregated, race-based data is needed on employment, income, poverty and a host of other factors to really understand how newcomers are faring in Canada.

“We need to start acting, and we are urging every level of government to act urgently to address the root causes of (poverty among immigrants),” she said.
 

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Case involving Prince Harry’s immigration paperwork inches forward
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Ashraf Khalil
Published Feb 05, 2025 • 2 minute read

WASHINGTON — A federal judge is considering next steps in a slow-moving court case over whether to release documents that could spell legal trouble for Prince Harry, with an influential conservative think tank seeking to reveal if he lied on his immigration paperwork about past drug use or received special treatment to enter the country.


The case before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols centers on the circumstances under which Harry — the Duke of Sussex and the son of King Charles III — entered the United States when he and his wife Meghan Markle moved to Southern California in 2020. The Heritage Foundation sued after the Department of Homeland Security largely rejected its Freedom of Information Act request to release Harry’s records. Harry is not a party in the lawsuit.

“We believe the American people have a right to know whether Prince Harry was truthful on his application,” said Nile Gardiner, head of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

Heritage has argued there is “intense public interest” in whether Harry received special treatment during the application process, particularly after his 2023 memoir “Spare” revealed past drug use.


Harry says in “Spare” that he took cocaine several times starting around age 17, in order “to feel. To be different.” He also acknowledged using cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms.

The U.S. routinely asks about drug use on its visa applications, and it has been linked to travel headaches for celebrities, including chef Nigella Lawson, singer Amy Winehouse and model Kate Moss. Acknowledgment of past drug use doesn’t necessarily bar people from entering or staying in the country, but answering untruthfully can have serious consequences.


“If he lied, that gets you deported,” Heritage’s attorney Samuel Dewey told reporters after the hearing. “People are routinely deported for lying on immigration forms.”


Dewey said it’s also possible that Harry was truthful about his prior drug use on his application, and received either an internal DHS waiver or some sort of diplomatic visa from the State Department. Both options are legal but would leave the government and Harry open to accusations of special treatment.

Wednesday’s hearing before Judge Nichols focused largely on how to handle a trio of sworn statements from DHS officials on why the agency was fighting the records request. Those statements have not been seen by the Heritage legal team, and Nichols is considering whether to release part or all of those declarations to the Heritage Foundation. The judge — who has been shown some, but not all, of Harry’s immigration records — said he’s also considering whether to request more records from the government and whether to call in an outside expert as a consultant.

Nichols said he’s seeking to strike a balance between revealing too much information in the DHS statements and redacting them to the point of meaninglessness.

“There’s a point where redactions would leave just a name or a date,” he said.

Gardiner said he was also appealing to President Donald Trump — who made immigration security a centerpiece of his campaign — to end the case by simply ordering the release of Harry’s paperwork.
 

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Newly unsealed documents reveal more details of prosecutors’ evidence in 9/11 attacks
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Ellen Knickmeyer
Published Feb 06, 2025 • 2 minute read

WASHINGTON — Newly unsealed documents give one of the most detailed views yet of the evidence gathered on the accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, including how prosecutors allege he and others interacted with the hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.


The summaries of evidence released Thursday include Mohammed’s own statements over the years, phone records and other documents alleging coordination between Mohammed and the hijackers, videos included in al-Qaida’s planning for the attacks and prosecutors’ summaries of government simulations of the flights of the four airliners that day. But few other details were given.

Also to be presented are the photos and death certificates of 2,976 people killed that day at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field, where the fourth airliner commandeered by the al-Qaida hijackers smashed into the ground after a revolt by passengers.

The newly revealed framework of military prosecutors’ potential case against Mohammed, who prosecutors say conceived of and executed much of al-Qaida’s attack, is contained in a plea agreement that the Defense Department is battling in court to roll back.


Mohammed and two co-defendants agreed in the plea deal with military prosecutors to plead guilty in the attack in return for life sentences.

The Associated Press, The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Fox News, NBC and Univision are suing to get the plea bargains unsealed. The summaries of the prosecution evidence were released Thursday in a partially redacted version of Mohammed’s agreement.

The evidence summaries point to the possibility of additional revelations about the attacks yet to come.

As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors, defence and the senior Pentagon official overseeing the cases at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, agreed to an unusual step — a hearing that would allow them to make public the evidence compiled against the three.


It appears designed to address complaints from families and others that a plea bargain typically would otherwise keep the evidence from fully being revealed.

Another unusual part of the deal mandated Mohammed to agree to answer questions from the families of victims.

Military prosecutors, defence attorneys and Guantanamo officials negotiated the deal over two years under government auspices. The negotiations were an attempt to bring a resolution to the 9/11 case, which has remained in pretrial hearings for more than two decades since the attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin interceded to try to void the plea agreement after it was announced, saying that waiving the possibility of the death penalty in so grave an attack was a decision that defence secretaries should handle.

Federal court hearings in the Defense Department’s attempts to roll back the plea agreements are ongoing.

Legal arguments over whether the sustained torture that Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants underwent in CIA custody has rendered their statements in the case inadmissible and has slowed the case. So have repeated staffing changes at the Guantanamo court and the logistical difficulties of holding a trial in a courtroom a plane flight away from the U.S.

— Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister contributed reporting from New York.