Welcome to the official webpage of the Chair on Migrant Protection and International Law! Here, you can learn more about our mandate, research streams, ongoing projects, and team. This page is updated regularly.

Overview

Canada is frequently portrayed as having one of the world's best immigration and refugee systems and as a model for other countries. However, this conventional narrative obscures substantial contradictions, weaknesses, policy tensions, and dilemmas that migrants and stakeholders navigate daily. The last two decades have seen major changes to Canada's immigration and refugee policies, including more restrictive measures that affect unauthorized arrivals, modified processes for asylum seekers, expanded temporary migration programs with limited protections, increased complexity in pathways to permanent residency, and enhanced removal mechanisms. 

Despite these significant changes in Canada’s domestic policy, Canada's humanitarian brand remains strong internationally. This is partly due to a lack of research critically examining Canada’s role in global displacement responses, and the fact that the interplay between Canada’s domestic migration policies and its international engagement remains understudied. 

The Chair on Migrant Protection and International Law aims to bridge these research silos by examining the relationship between Canada's domestic and international actions regarding diverse migrant populations, including temporary workers, international students, non-status migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. The Chair will develop law and policy frameworks aimed at enhancing migrants' rights and protections through a multidisciplinary, multi-sectoral, and comparative approach — both interprovincial and international — with significant involvement of Francophone researchers and bilingual dissemination of research findings.