Source: http://www.caronpartners.com/immigration-blog/2016/1/18/hc-applications-and-the-scc-in-kanthasamy
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 20:50:19+00:00

Document:
H&C Applications and the SCC in Kanthasamy — Caron & Partners LLP Caron & Partners LLP Your Alberta Law Firm. Strategic, practical solutions for all your legal needs.
In December 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ("SCC") released a very important decision on how Immigration Officers are supposed to evaluate cases in humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) applications. H&C applications are usually filed by individuals in Canada who do not have any other way of immigrating or remaining in Canada, and often face tremendous hardships of having to return to their home country. An H&C application is the last hope for many individuals and families.
In recent years, Officers have been routinely refusing applications when applicants face hardships in their country that is universally felt by everyone living in that country. As a result, even if the conditions in a particular country are deplorable, the applicants were being refused because the hardship felt too broadly by others living there.
Officers also limited their analysis to hardship that met the threshold of "unusual and undeserved" or "disproportionate". These terms are not found anywhere in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act ("IRPA") or Regulations.
This is why the SCC's decision in Kanthasamy is so important. Canada's highest court has provided very clear jurisprudence on how Immigration Officers are to evaluate H&C applications. Here are some excerpts from the decision that are particularly helpful.
 The words “unusual and undeserved or disproportionate hardship” should therefore be treated as descriptive, not as creating three new thresholds for relief separate and apart from the humanitarian purpose of s. 25(1). As a result, what officers should not do, is look at s. 25(1) through the lens of the three adjectives as discrete and high thresholds, and use the language of “unusual and undeserved or disproportionate hardship” in a way that limits their ability to consider and give weight to all relevant humanitarian and compassionate considerations in a particular case. The three adjectives should be seen as instructive but not determinative, allowing s. 25(1) to respond more flexibly to the equitable goals of the provision.
 Applying that standard, in my respectful view, the Officer failed to consider Jeyakannan Kanthasamy’s circumstances as a whole, and took an unduly narrow approach to the assessment of the circumstances raised in the application. She failed to give sufficiently serious consideration to his youth, his mental health and the evidence that he would suffer discrimination if he were returned to Sri Lanka. Instead, she took a segmented approach, assessed each factor to see whether it represented hardship that was “unusual and undeserved or disproportionate”, then appeared to discount each from her final conclusion because it failed to satisfy that threshold. Her literal obedience to those adjectives, which do not appear anywhere in s. 25(1), rather than looking at his circumstances as a whole, led her to see each of them as a distinct legal test, rather than as words designed to help reify the equitable purpose of the provision. This had the effect of improperly restricting her discretion and rendering her decision unreasonable.
 This effectively resulted in the Officer concluding that, in the absence of evidence that Jeyakannan Kanthasamy would be personally targeted by discriminatory action, there was no evidence of discrimination. With respect, the Officer’s approach failed to account for the fact that discrimination can be inferred where an applicant shows that he or she is a member of a group that is discriminated against. Discrimination for the purpose of humanitarian and compassionate applications “could manifest in isolated incidents or permeate systemically”, and even “[a] series of discriminatory events that do not give rise to persecution must be considered cumulatively”: Jamie Chai Yun Liew and Donald Galloway, Immigration Law (2nd ed. 2015), at p. 413, citing Divakaran v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 2011 FC 633 (CanLII).
 The “best interests” principle is “highly contextual” because of the “multitude of factors that may impinge on the child’s best interest”: Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada (Attorney General), 2004 SCC 4 (CanLII),  1 S.C.R. 76, at para. 11; Gordon v. Goertz, 1996 CanLII 191 (SCC),  2 S.C.R. 27, at para. 20. It must therefore be applied in a manner responsive to each child’s particular age, capacity, needs and maturity: see A.C. v. Manitoba (Director of Child and Family Services), 2009 SCC 30 (CanLII),  2 S.C.R. 181, at para. 89. The child’s level of development will guide its precise application in the context of a particular case.
 Protecting children through the “best interests of the child” principle is widely understood and accepted in Canada’s legal system: A.B. v. Bragg Communications Inc., 2012 SCC 46 (CanLII),  2 S.C.R. 567, at para. 17. It means “[d]eciding what . . . appears most likely in the circumstances to be conducive to the kind of environment in which a particular child has the best opportunity for receiving the needed care and attention”: MacGyver v. Richards (1995), 1995 CanLII 8886 (ON CA), 22 O.R. (3d) 481 (C.A.), at p. 489.
. . . attentiveness and sensitivity to the importance of the rights of children, to their best interests, and to the hardship that may be caused to them by a negative decision is essential for [a humanitarian and compassionate] decision to be made in a reasonable manner. . . .
 It is difficult to see how a child can be more “directly affected” than where he or she is the applicant. In my view, the status of the applicant as a child triggers not only the requirement that the “best interests” be treated as a significant factor in the analysis, it should also influence the manner in which the child’s other circumstances are evaluated. And since “[c]hildren will rarely, if ever, be deserving of any hardship”, the concept of “unusual or undeserved hardship” is presumptively inapplicable to the assessment of the hardship invoked by a child to support his or her application for humanitarian and compassionate relief: Hawthorne, at para. 9. Because children may experience greater hardship than adults faced with a comparable situation, circumstances which may not warrant humanitarian and compassionate relief when applied to an adult, may nonetheless entitle a child to relief: see Kim v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2010 FC 149 (CanLII),  2 F.C.R. 448 (F.C.), at para. 58; UNHCR, Guidelines on International Protection No. 8: Child Asylum Claims under Articles 1(A)2 and 1(F) of the 1951 Convention and/or 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, HCR/GIP/09/08, December 22, 2009.
It remains to be seen how CIC (or now IRCC) will interpret this jurisprudence in assessing H&C applications. I suspect refusals will continue and that we will see further guidance from the Federal Court on judicial review.

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