Framing “us” and “them” in Canada’s Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States

The Canadian government defines a “safe third country” as one that respects human rights and can offer genuine protection to refugee claimants. However, in 2017, attention to the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) heightened in Canadian social and political discourse due to questions about the suitability of the United States as a safe third country. Despite challenges to the policy, in 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that the STCA remains constitutional. The legal, political, and media discourse in Canada around the evolution of the policy variably portrayed groups of migrants as “asylum seekers,” “refugee claimants,” “queue jumpers,” and “illegal” or “irregular” border crossers. These labels can create drastically different impressions in the public eye. They can either criminalize or inspire sympathy for migrants, and they can have profound effects on policymaking and on the ways in which people are perceived and treated.

This research interrogates how contemporary discourses around asylum seeking are produced and reproduced in Canada and how they influence policy. It examines how discursive framing can affect the legitimization of exclusionary policies in the Canadian context. Policies that illegalize immigrants and asylum seekers create divisions between “us” and “them,” calling into question Canada’s identity as a multicultural nation. The research aims to reveal the unexamined forces at play in shaping and dictating Canadian immigration policy.

This research focuses on discursive norms and policy developments beginning in 2017 and continuing through the present. Using interpretive policy analysis, media coverage and government sources related to the STCA will be analyzed to understand how the issue has been framed. The analysis focuses on how the problem being addressed by the STCA is framed by different actors, what solutions are proposed and how they are framed, and how competing political positions are framed as legitimate or illegitimate.

Conference presentation:

Gagnon, M. Framing immigration policy in the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement. Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association. George Brown College, Toronto. June 3, 2025.