No Refuge

Lloyd Fournier sits on a wooden bench in a Toronto park on a warm spring day and tilts his dull, grey eyes to the sky as he recalls his nightmares. The unsettling images arrive uninvited to disturb his sleep and his life. One memory stands out for Fournier, a businessman turned gatekeeper for the Immigration and Refugee Board (irb), a quasi-judicial tribunal that delivers rulings on thousands of would-be refugees who arrive in Canada each year. He remembers a middle-aged, slightly built Syrian who stood before him several years ago wearing a black eye patch. As Fournier pressed him for details about the Syrian police, the man lifted the patch to reveal the garbled remains of a right eye stabbed with a scalding poker. “This is what they gave me,” he said.

“I saw mutilated people that still haunt me,” says the drawn-looking fifty-nine-year-old. “The cases stay with me a long time, too long a time.”

Fournier’s thin face, framed by an unruly beard and a brown Stetson, shows a slight grimace as he thinks back on the scene and begins to recount the arc of his tumultuous career inside the irb. Raised in southwestern Ontario, Fournier was, at heart, a contrarian. A self-confessed child of the counterculture and an opponent of the Vietnam War, he provided safe haven to US draft dodgers while attending the University of Windsor in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Fournier moved to Brampton, a bedroom community northwest of Toronto, where he still lives, his politics were decidedly Liberal red in a sea of Conservative blue. “I was a round hole in a square peg,” he says, smiling. As a globe-trotting businessman, he gravitated to helping immigrants and refugees — the proud descendant of Acadians was always mindful of those forced from their homelands or searching for a better life. With the support of his church, Fournier was soon offering newcomers advice on untangling red tape so they could secure landed-immigrant status, and he helped to steer migrants into the skilled trades.

In time, Fournier built a comfortable life in suburbia, with a wife and children. An admirer of Pierre Trudeau, he ran for city council, served as the president of the local riding association, and made an unsuccessful bid for a federal seat, most often operating under the Liberal banner. There were other disappointments along the way, but when Fournier was named to the irb’s refugee-protection division in June 2001 — with a teacher, a lawyer, a real estate broker, a journalist, and another businessman — he seized the opportunity with a mixture of excitement and anticipation. Surrounded by family and friends, Fournier promised at his swearing-in ceremony to carry out his duties faithfully and impartially. “I was proud, very proud. It was an honour,” he says. “This job is part of nation-building. You have a hand in deciding who stays in this country and who does not.”

Fournier readily acknowledges that his Liberal party ties, coupled with his volunteer experience, played a deciding role in his irb appointment by the citizenship and immigration minister, Elinor Caplan, and he is unapologetic about it: “Why would any government not want to surround itself with people that are at least sympathetic to their point of view?”

Fournier understood, as well, that Canada’s door has often been guarded by influential and sometimes invisible mandarins. Indeed, this nation’s checkered immigration record — the notorious head tax on Chinese labourers; the forced return of “boat people” who sailed into Vancouver harbour from Hong Kong in 1913; the turning back of European Jewry during the World War II era, and the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians — had Fournier privately echoing historian Irving Abella’s blunt verdict that powerful bureaucrats and the governments they served “knew what kind of people [Canadians] wanted and how to keep out those we did not.” Despite his misgivings, Fournier was eager to get started.

But before the fresh batch of irb members could adjudicate cases, they were schooled in immigration and refugee law, the rules of evidence, legal precedents, and how to write a decision. Fournier welcomed the training as evidence of the board’s diligence. He began his new job on July 3, 2001, convinced that he was prepared to make judgments about the lives and futures of people based solely on the merits of their claims.

Fournier quickly gained a reputation as a respected board member who cleared cases with care and speed. In December 2002, eighteen months into the job, his official performance review described him as “hard-working and productive . . . helpful, personable and eager to take on additional work.” The appraisal added that his case preparations were thorough, his hearings focused, and that he delivered decisions expeditiously. “The amount of work completed by Mr. Fournier early in his mandate is a significant achievement,” read the report.

A year later, that report card helped Fournier win a five-year reappointment and prompted senior irb managers to ask him to join the refugee-protection division’s Central European team. Fournier agreed and moved to the new unit in the fall of 2003. “They were quite happy to have me there because they were really swamped with cases,” he boasts. “I was a star member. I was out-producing everybody.” His cherished independence intact, Fournier believed that he alone enjoyed the authority to render decisions on his files “and that nobody would dare question them.”

In early December 2003, Tamas Csepregi, a young, dark-haired Hungarian Rom, and his wife, Beata, stood before Fournier and quietly appealed to remain in Canada. Csepregi was the identical twin brother of Attila, a Rom who had fled to Canada with his wife in the late 1990s. The couple joined scores of Roma who had immigrated to Canada and claimed refugee status because of abuse and discrimination they endured back home. Pejoratively referred to as gypsies and falsely thought of as stateless vagabonds, Roma refugees present an intriguing challenge for host countries. While most who come to Canada hail from the Czech Republic and Hungary, “back home” can be difficult to define and verify. Nonetheless, in 1998, the irb accepted an overwhelming majority of Roma claimants. The next year, however, less than 10 percent of the Hungarian Roma cases were approved. How to account for the dramatic drop?