In 1973, the Trudeau government decided that Canada’s immigration and refugee policies were outdated and in need of revision. Canada’s response to a series of refugee situations—the Czechs in 1968, Asian Ugandans in 1972 and Chileans in 1973—had each required the creation of new regulations, and it was clear that a more general framework was needed to allow for a more flexible and nimble response to humanitarian crises. A series of government-led national dialogues on immigration were held, culminating in the passage of the Immigration Act in 1976, and its implementation two years later.
The act made a number of important changes to refugee policy. The most important included the principle of admission to Canada on humanitarian grounds and a provision for private sponsorship of refugees (which had previously been an ad hoc arrangement with each refugee situation). The act was almost immediately tested by the “Boat People” crisis of 1979–80, during which...
Geoffrey Cameron is principal researcher with the Baha’i Community of Canada, and a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the co-author of Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future (Princeton University Press, 2011), with Ian Goldin and Meera Balarajan.
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