Who needs America, when Canada has ICE at home?

Mark Carney's CBSA conducts ICE-like raids on Canadian workers

Traditionally, Canadians only encounter agents of the Canada Border Services Agency at the actual border, like this crossing from Michigan to Ontario in Sault Ste. Marie. But with Mark Carney’s hiring spree for new inland enforcement agents, you will now see the CBSA raiding workplaces on a regular basis, much the same as ICE does in America. | Copyright © Bohao Zhao, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Most Canadians can agree that America’s ICE agency, which hunts down random people based on the colour of their skin and then throws them into concentration camps, is not a model which Canada should emulate. Indeed, many Americans would agree that ICE is a monstrous group, although it is highly polarized based on being a Democrat or Republican, or in more simplified terms, whether you are good or evil.

And I think most reasonable people around the globe would agree! Armed thugs bursting into places and grabbing people on the thinnest of pretenses to disappear them is not the behaviour of a civilized society. It is a symptom of the rank degeneracy that is fascism. It is fundamentally corrosive to a free society.

So Canada totally wouldn’t do anything similar, right? Because Canada is so much better than America, we don’t need to do any self-reflection on whether we’ve cultivated similarly fascist practices, right?

Right?

You really shouldn’t be surprised. Have I not talked enough about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s disturbing chumminess with Donald Trump, in more articles and more podcasts than I can link to? Are embarrassments like Bill C-2, now repackaged as Bill C-12, not humiliating enough to stop now that Amnesty International slams them as blatant appeasement to America’s Fascist-in-Chief?

No, apparently not. Now we’re putting these laws into practice, and demonstrating immediately how quickly American fascism is mirrored by the government of our Canadian client state. Earlier this year, Carney announced that his government would hire a thousand additional inland enforcement agents.

While Canadians will primarily be familiar with CBSA when passing customs and immigration upon return to Canada, inland enforcement agents operate within Canada, hunting down anyone they suspect of being undocumented.

And what this increase in inland CBSA agents means in practice for Canadian society has become emphatically clear this week, with activity in Calgary demonstrating that CBSA is starting to look suspiciously similar to ICE in the United States.

Currently, the Calgary Flames play in the NHL at the Scotiabank Saddledome, which they share with several smaller teams, including the Flames’ AHL affiliate, a WHL team named after wrestler Bret “Hitman” Hart, and a lacrosse and basketball team which play in Canada’s NLL and CEBL.

While it’s unclear where those teams will be playing in the future, what is clear is that the Calgary Flames will be moving to Scotia Place, currently under construction with the intent to be ready for the 2027-28 NHL season. Scotia Place will be the main feature of this development, but it will be part of a larger events centre and entertainment district.

Naturally, the construction work to build such an expansive project requires many labourers, and thus a whole slew of jobs are created at the worksite. These people get paid for their work, and then they spend that money in the local economy and pay taxes to the federal and provincial government. This is good for Calgary, good for Alberta, and good for Canada. It is the sign of a well-functioning economy.

But anti-immigrant fervour, stoked by those who wish to use immigrants as a scapegoat for our homegrown social ills, has pushed the foolish among us to cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Yesterday, inland CBSA agents backed up by Calgary Police raided the Scotia Place construction site, demanding to see the ID of all workers present.

According to both CBSA and Calgary Police, the latter were present to back up the former due to the large size of the work force. In practice, what this means is that local law enforcement are collaborating with these crackdowns on local workers. These employees showed immense fear, with many leaving the workplace and not returning.

One construction worker, Tamara Watson, expressed that due to being indigenous, she was worried by the presence of CBSA and Calgary Police; considering numerous reports of indigenous people being seized by racist ICE agents, this is a well-grounded fear.

Immigration lawyer Raj Sharma makes the point that these raids are not random, but rather based on anonymous tips, meaning that CBSA raids can be weaponized by members of the public, such as an industry competitor seeking to disrupt operations, or racists seeking to make the lives of brown people more difficult in our country.

What is clear, however, is that the increase in funding to CBSA was for the purpose of increasing inland operations, similar to those conducted by ICE in the United States. And like ICE, these inland agents are targeting racialized populations on the basis of visible characteristics like skin colour.

Indeed, considering how diverse Canadian society is, it’s absurd to claim that you can visually distinguish who is and isn’t Canadian, unless you are a blatant racist. And yet this is now a shared ethos between CBSA and ICE.

So, how soon before CBSA starts emulating other practices by ICE? How long before Canada also has camps where people disappear, and never return from?

I fear that it may be sooner than we think.