Audrey Macklin
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, Faculty Member
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This conference aims to critically explore a variety of methods across jurisdictions and disciplines for advancing formal multinational corporation accountability and norms that would impact, advance, and entrench formal and informal... more
This conference aims to critically explore a variety of methods across jurisdictions and disciplines for advancing formal multinational corporation accountability and norms that would impact, advance, and entrench formal and informal global citizenship values and corporate norms – all contributing to better governance. Holding multinational corporations accountable will require novel solutions, which will not be “one-size-fits-all” solutions, but will account for variations in national and international contexts as well as societal norms and informal institutions that perpetuate and reinforce these norms, be it public or private sector
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Research Interests: Refugee and Persecution
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This chapter describes and critiques refugee resettlement, ostensibly a ‘durable solution’ to displacement. Contemporary resettlement is practised mainly by high-income liberal democracies of the Global North, the same States that... more
This chapter describes and critiques refugee resettlement, ostensibly a ‘durable solution’ to displacement. Contemporary resettlement is practised mainly by high-income liberal democracies of the Global North, the same States that reluctantly receive asylum seekers coming mainly from the Global South. This tension between asylum and resettlement explains many of the features of contemporary resettlement practices, whereby asylum is governed through law and resettlement is usually framed as a matter of discretion. To reveal and explore this tension between asylum and resettlement, and examine resettlement’s shifting and problematic role in refugee protection, the chanoteppter surveys its historical development. It then looks at three key aspects of contemporary practice, namely its relationship with sovereignty, its decision-making processes, and how States treat resettled refugees.
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Each and every empirical analysis of statehood, sovereignty, and territorial delimitation disrupts and contradicts the conventional understanding of states as clearly demarcated geopolitical entities. Historically, the concept of dynastic... more
Each and every empirical analysis of statehood, sovereignty, and territorial delimitation disrupts and contradicts the conventional understanding of states as clearly demarcated geopolitical entities. Historically, the concept of dynastic sovereign rule over a territory emerged after the carnage of the firs t European or Thirty Years' War of 1618"48 . In it, one third of the central European population perished, and nobilities and rulers sorely missed the revenues of these once productive and taxpaying subjects. In the peace of 1648'49, their delegates established the so-called Westphalian state system that still exists at the beginning of the 21st century: To prevent another European war, rulers held sovereignty over their territory, borders were meant to be inviolable, neighbouring rulers were not to interfere with the internal affairs of other states. However, these self-contained polities, in an economic and sociological perspective, were part oflarger spaces. In th...
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This paper focuses on the evolution of Canadian citizenship under the Conservative government (2006–2015), and makes three claims. First the Conservatives systematically resiled from the citizenship policies that typify a settler society,... more
This paper focuses on the evolution of Canadian citizenship under the Conservative government (2006–2015), and makes three claims. First the Conservatives systematically resiled from the citizenship policies that typify a settler society, and this was congruent with contemporaneous changes to Canadian immigration policy. Second, citizenship law furnished an ideal platform for staging the re-branding of Canada as Warrior Nation, a pet Conservative project. Third, the role played during the Fall 2015 federal election by one particular citizenship policy (the ban on niqabs while swearing the citizenship oath) reveals a lingering, and perhaps chronic, ambiguity about the character of Canadian citizenship in an era where forces of globalization and nationalist retrenchment impose competing pressures on state citizenship regimes.
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The Supreme Court of Canada has vacillated in its guidance about the incorporation of the Charter into the exercise of discretion. The author contends that Dore’s attempt to synchronize proportionality analysis (derived from... more
The Supreme Court of Canada has vacillated in its guidance about the incorporation of the Charter into the exercise of discretion. The author contends that Dore’s attempt to synchronize proportionality analysis (derived from constitutional adjudication) with deferential reasonableness review (derived from administrative law) is unsatisfactory. The replacement of Charter ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ with Charter ‘value’ obscures the recognition of rights and freedoms in play. The administrative law proportionality analysis that the Court endorses in Dore does not respect the primacy or priority of Charter rights, and curial deference toward the outcomes it produces exacerbate the dilution of rights protection. The author warns of the negative incentives this creates for governance and the rule of law. She proposes a set of alternative factors and considerations that ought to animate the exercise of discretion, and judicial review of discretion, where Charter rights or freedoms are at stake.
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This article examines the gendered reverberations of global capital investment in a conflict zone, from the north with armed conflict in the south. Specifically, the article examines the author’s experience as a member of an independent... more
This article examines the gendered reverberations of global capital investment in a conflict zone, from the north with armed conflict in the south. Specifically, the article examines the author’s experience as a member of an independent assessment mission to Sudan appointed by the Canadian government. The team’s mandate was to investigate the link between oil development and human rights violations with particular reference to the Canadian oil company Talisman. In 1998 Talisman acquired a 25% share in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC). North and South Sudan had been embroiled in an armed civil conflict almost continuously since 1956 and the oil fields were located on contested territory. This article contrasts the idea of human security (advanced as part of Canada’s foreign policy agenda at the time), with traditional conceptions of military and corporate security, using the experience of Sudanese women affected by the conflict as a way of illustrating the incongruities between competing understandings of security. It concludes that the presence of Talisman in Sudan encouraged the prioritization of corporate and military security over human security, exacerbating the human rights violations and perpetuating the struggle of women. Finally, this article evaluates strategies used by different stakeholders to encourage the Canadian company to take responsibility for its role in human rights violations.
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The securitization of immigration prioritizes the goal of protecting the body politic from infection by the menacing foreigner. The securitization of legal citizenship complements this process by facilitating the discursive and sometimes... more
The securitization of immigration prioritizes the goal of protecting the body politic from infection by the menacing foreigner. The securitization of legal citizenship complements this process by facilitating the discursive and sometimes literal mutation of the citizen into the foreigner. Investing in mechanisms that enable the conversion or reversion of risky people to the legal status of foreigner simplifies the equation of state security with citizen security. Ordinarily, an elision of national security with citizen security founders on the realization that a state's pursuit of the former almost invariably involves individual rights violations that jeopardize the latter. However, if a population can be persuaded that alleged security risks are or ought to be regarded as essentially 'foreign', then it becomes easier to promote what is done in the name of state security as coeval and consonant with advancing citizen security. This trend carries with it certain implicati...
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This work was prepared as part of the EU–Canada project - The Changing Landscape of Justice and Home Affairs Cooperation in the European Union and EU-Canada Relations – funded by the European Commission, Directorate-General for External... more
This work was prepared as part of the EU–Canada project - The Changing Landscape of Justice and Home Affairs Cooperation in the European Union and EU-Canada Relations – funded by the European Commission, Directorate-General for External Relations, Relations with the US and Canada.
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Held on November 12, 2010, from 12:00pm - 2:00pm. Stedman Lecture Hall, Room 120E, York University.
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Canada has been seen globally as a leader in immigration and integration policies and programs and as an attractive and welcoming country for immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students. The COVID-19... more
Canada has been seen globally as a leader in immigration and integration policies and programs and as an attractive and welcoming country for immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some of the strengths of Canada’s immigration system, as well as some of the fault lines that have been developing over the last few years. In this article we provide an overview of Canada’s immigration system prior to the pandemic, discuss the system’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities revealed by the pandemic, and explore a post-COVID-19 immigration vision. Over the next three years, the Government of Canada intends to bring over 1.2 million new permanent residents to Canada. In addition, Canada will continue to accept many international students, refugee claimants, and temporary foreign workers for temporary residence here. The importance of immigration for Canada will continue to grow and be an integral component of the country’s po...
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The authors argue that states were historically less bordered and self-contained than public opinion and the scholarship oriented around the nation-state have assumed. First, the authors address the permeability of borders in the period... more
The authors argue that states were historically less bordered and self-contained than public opinion and the scholarship oriented around the nation-state have assumed. First, the authors address the permeability of borders in the period of mass migration at the turn to the 20th century, taking as examples migrants to Canada from Europe, China, and elsewhere. Second, they discuss the period of the 1880s to 1940s, during which the emergence of the working classes in the Atlantic world and “pauperism” prompted the emergence of transatlantic social thought. By mid-twentieth century, social citizenship arose as a corollary to political citizenship. Third, they discern a new stage of political interaction from the founding of the United Nations to the turn of the 21st century, in which democracies have become highly sensitive to developments beyond their borders and have become linked into a comprehensive multilateral system of organizations and legal rules. While noting that Canada’s record in protecting the rights of non-citizens within its borders earns it deserved praise, the authors argue that Canada simultaneously expends great effort on policing and preventing initial border crossings by those claiming human rights protection. While Canada has a relatively strong culture of rights protection and a famously weak conception of national identity, it also has an underestimated system of border control. The authors finally describe three liminal figures whose experiences illustrate the paradoxical interactions between rights and borders in Canada: the citizen abroad, the foreigner within, and the would-be asylum seeker.
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Refugees are vanishing from the territory of wealthy industrialized nations. I do not mean that refugees are literally disappearing. Despite the best efforts of western governments to deter them, thousands of asylum seekers do manage to... more
Refugees are vanishing from the territory of wealthy industrialized nations. I do not mean that refugees are literally disappearing. Despite the best efforts of western governments to deter them, thousands of asylum seekers do manage to arrive and lodge refugee claims each year. I refer here not to the legal and material reality of refugees, but rather to the erosion of the idea that people who seek asylum may actually be refugees. This dispiriting turn in public sentiment is enabled by a series of legal and popular conjunctions that produce what I call the discursive disappearance of the refugee. This erasure performs a crucial preparatory step toward legitimating actual laws and practices that attempt to make them vanish in reality. While such policies can never entirely succeed in preventing entry, they may reduce numbers, and they can and do consign a growing proportion of entrants to the illegal category. This article explores one such legal instrument designed to constrain the...
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The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within... more
The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within this framework, the state is understood as advancing the goal of protecting the ‘encultured subject’ from the disempowering effects of her religion. The author departs from this trend by reading the Canadian controversy over Islamic family law arbitration against a legal landscape that already authorises and encourages parties to settle matters of property division and support through private ordering. The author argues that faith-based arbitration and its normative driver, multiculturalism, were already nested within the domain of privatisation and neoliberal ideals of choice, liberty and autonomy. Facilitation of private ordering in family law paved the way for faith-based arbitration. Through a close reading of Supreme Court of Canada family law ju...
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The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within... more
The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within this framework, the state is understood as advancing the goal of protecting the ‘encultured subject’ from the disempowering effects of her religion. The author departs from this trend by reading the Canadian controversy over Islamic family law arbitration against a legal landscape that already authorises and encourages parties to settle matters of property division and support through private ordering. The author argues that faith-based arbitration and its normative driver, multiculturalism, were already nested within the domain of privatisation and neoliberal ideals of choice, liberty and autonomy. Facilitation of private ordering in family law paved the way for faith-based arbitration. Through a close reading of Supreme Court of Canada family law ju...
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Foreign Domestic Worker: Surrogate Housewife or Mail Order Servant? ... Canadians often associate indentured labour with a remote past, and a racially atratified labour market with the legacy of alavery and colonizationin other ountries.... more
Foreign Domestic Worker: Surrogate Housewife or Mail Order Servant? ... Canadians often associate indentured labour with a remote past, and a racially atratified labour market with the legacy of alavery and colonizationin other ountries. The existence of a Canadian immigration ...
In Suresh v. Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and Ahani v. MCI, the Supreme Court of Canada declared that removing a refugee accused of terrorism to a country where he or she would face a substantial risk of torture or similar... more
In Suresh v. Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and Ahani v. MCI, the Supreme Court of Canada declared that removing a refugee accused of terrorism to a country where he or she would face a substantial risk of torture or similar abuse would virtually always violate the individual’s rights under s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While the Court deserves praise for vindicating fundamental human rights over competing claims of national security, coming so close on the heels of September 11, the victory is in certain respects more apparent than real. Given the strong endorsement of judicial deference to the exercise of Ministerial discretion in national security matters, the Court leaves the state wide scope to circumvent the spirit of the judgment while adhering to its letter.
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For at least three decades, a tiny number of Canadian church congregations have provided sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. For even longer, many faith-based groups (among others) participate in resettling refugees through a government... more
For at least three decades, a tiny number of Canadian church congregations have provided sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. For even longer, many faith-based groups (among others) participate in resettling refugees through a government program called private refugee sponsorship. Both sanctuary and sponsorship practices arise as specific responses to practices of exclusion and inclusion under national migration regimes. Each may be understood as modes of hospitality. Sanctuary engages members of individual church congregations in oppositional politics, whereby they confront and challenge state authority to exclude. Refugee sponsorship embodies a form of collaborative politics, in which sponsorship groups partner with government in settlement and integration. Through interviews with individuals who participated in sanctuary and in sponsorship, we explore the perceptions of people who provide both. We observe how the state’s perspective on asylum versus resettlement structures the for...
A handful of Canadian church congregations provide sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. Many also participate in resettling refugees through a government program called private sponsorship. Both sanctuary and sponsorship arise as specific... more
A handful of Canadian church congregations provide sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. Many also participate in resettling refugees through a government program called private sponsorship. Both sanctuary and sponsorship arise as specific modes of hospitality in response to practices of exclusion and inclusion under national migration regimes. Sanctuary engages oppositional politics, whereby providers confront and challenge state authority to exclude. Refugee sponsorship embodies a form of collaborative politics, in which sponsorship groups partner with government in settlement and integration. I demonstrate how the state’s perspective on asylum versus resettlement structures the relationship between citizen and state and between citizen and refugee. I also reveal that there is more collaboration in sanctuary and resistance in sponsorship than might be supposed.
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The Canadian government has used 9/11 and the consequential focus on security as a cover for negotiating an agreement with the United States which would deflect Canada-bound asylum seekers who pass through the United States. Is this... more
The Canadian government has used 9/11 and the consequential focus on security as a cover for negotiating an agreement with the United States which would deflect Canada-bound asylum seekers who pass through the United States. Is this agreement really about security? If not, what is the agreement about? The paper assesses the likely impact of the agreement on security - on Canada, on the US, and on refugees?
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The global migration of COVID-19 not only disrupted transborder movement. In many (if not most) states, statis, and closure became the default norm at and within borders. This, in turn, generated exceptions organized around an idea of... more
The global migration of COVID-19 not only disrupted transborder movement. In many (if not most) states, statis, and closure became the default norm at and within borders. This, in turn, generated exceptions organized around an idea of “essential” entry. The category of “essential” was produced, revised, and represented through the interaction of pandemic-driven exigencies and nationally specific configurations of the legal, political, and economic forces in play. To understand how the admission into Canada of certain people was accepted as legally, economically and/or politically essential, one must take account of Canada's character as a settler society, its economic integration with the United States, and its growing dependence on migrant workers and international students to subsidize food production and higher education for nationals.