The Children are Citizens, the Parents are Undocumented: What Now?

Should Canadian born children’s eligibility for government, social and health services depend on their parent’s immigration status? In May 2018, the Quebec Ombudsman released a report urging the provincial health care administrator to seize this restrictive and faulty interpretation of the Quebec Health Insurance Act, which denies health care coverage to some Canadian children on the basis of their parents’ precarious immigration status in Canada. The investigation found that the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec tied the children’s eligibility to their parent’s lawful domicile in the province, a practice it justified with the aim of discouraging “an influx of clandestine migration into Quebec”. The result, according to the ombudsman, is systemic differential treatment with severe physical and psychological consequences that can undermine the children’s integration into the school and the community.

In this podcast, we explore what irregular immigration status means for children and how it affects their legal entitlement to all sorts of government benefits. We speak with both Milton Fernandes, a lawyer at PINAY, a nonprofit grassroots organization for migrant and immigrant Filipino women that advocates for changes to immigration and labor policy in Quebec, and Robert Leckey, Dean of McGill University’s Faculty of Law in Montreal.