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Insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety: this is daily life for many temporary immigrants in Canada. A large number have precarious status or no status at all, often through no fault of their own. Legal guidance is crucial to navigate the bureaucratic maze that can lead to permanent residency, but accessing quality legal representation is a challenge. On this World Refugee Day, we take a closer look at the issue.
“After getting my papers, I fell into a very deep depression and had to go on medication,” says Maria*, who arrived in Montreal 15 years ago, fleeing threats from a cartel. “The shock of not seeing my family for so long, leaving behind my culture, wondering if everything I went through was worth it... Wow, there was just so much to process. And all because a lawyer didn’t do their job.”
Maria is only just recovering from a long, grueling journey, which consisted of ten years of bureaucratic limbo in Canada and the constant burden of poor legal representation by a series of immigration lawyers, both from legal aid and the private sector. Lawyers who, despite everything, ended up costing her close to $7,000. The amount was staggering given her financial instability.
Her refugee claim form was filled out incorrectly, her file was lost, there was a lack of dedication, or even outright carelessness, in the defense of her case. Maria faced several situations where her lawyers simply let her down. She recounts her ordeal from her living room—six undocumented years and the sleepless nights that came with them.
“I decided to pay for my own lawyer, who in 2012 was charging $200 an hour. Even if it was just for two questions, ten minutes of conversation, I had to pay that amount,” she explains.
She remembers the bureaucratic entanglements: “There was a long string of lawyers. The first one made a mistake, and that created a domino effect that just kept going (...) Every new lawyer had to fix the previous one’s mistake, and in the meantime, new errors were piling up.”
"A lawyer is more than a legal representative. They literally hold your life in their hands. Your future depends on them," Maria adds.
Things finally started to turn around when she connected with Solidarité sans frontières, a Montreal-based migrant justice network. “I got involved with the Migrant Workers’ Centre, where I found support from different people across different areas,” says Maria.
Poor Legal Representation for Migrants
These barriers to quality legal services for migrants with precarious or no status in Quebec are the focus of a recent study published in early June by a group of researchers. The initiative was spearheaded by the legal clinic Just Solutions at the Montreal City Mission.
“Today, being a migrant with temporary or no status means facing huge difficulties in accessing your rights,” explains Delphine Nakache, one of the researchers. “Why? Because the system is underfunded and fails to recognize the needs of precarious-status migrants—their need for protection, for regularization, and their needs in other legal areas.”
Precarious or undocumented migrants form a highly diverse group characterized by the lack of permanent residency or work permits, as well as dependence on a third party for housing or employment. They often face barriers to public services and protection systems, including healthcare and education, and live with the constant risk of deportation. In Canada, this includes both those with temporary legal status (foreign workers, students, asylum seekers awaiting decisions) and those with unstable administrative situations (expired visas, rejected asylum claims).
According to the researchers, most people enter the country legally, and a number of them later lose that status for reasons often outside their control.
“It could be job loss, an abusive employer, domestic violence, or some triggering event that suddenly puts a person in a precarious situation. What you need to understand is that there’s a lot of luck involved in the immigration system today,” Nakache says.
The Luck Factor
Olga Houde worked for seven years at the Just Solutions clinic, a program aimed at improving access to justice for immigrants and refugees. Many of the people the clinic supports have had bad experiences with legal aid, but 99 per cent of those they help end up with favorable outcomes.
Houde came up with the idea for the study after supporting hundreds of people at the clinic. For her too, luck plays a decisive role in the legal support experience.
“If someone meets the right people—a good employer, a caring community—it can go well. But if they cross paths with people who are misinformed or dishonest, things can spiral quickly.”
Maria is familiar with Houde's statements: “I’ve paid a lawyer who didn’t do their job. So it’s a dilemma, because you never know whether you’ll get a professional or not.”
Maria's experience gives off the impression that immigrants are navigating a lottery. “Some [lawyers] genuinely want to help people. Others just look at you as a paycheck, as in: ‘How much money can I make off this person?’” Maria laments.
In the end, she had to rely on her intuition to choose a decent representative, “rather than whether they charge you $200 or not,” she adds wryly.
“Your body carries the memory—it won’t forget”
That lottery, it’s clear, took a serious toll on her wellbeing, including her mental health. “I paid for it, if you can call it that, with my physical, mental, and emotional health,” Maria says.
She recounts workplace abuse, physical and psychological violence from a partner—incidents she couldn’t report due to her undocumented status. She also mentions injuries sustained during off-the-books jobs, the legal battle to get compensation, and the sense of humiliation she felt when the judge delivered her ruling: “It was a woman, and she made it clear my pain didn’t matter. She threw out a number like, ‘Here, take this and go. Go spend it on your mom.’”
Her lawyer never saw that side of the story, she says: “They’ll never know what lies behind their lack of professionalism. Your body remembers. You’ll pay—with your physical health, your emotional stability, your relationships…”
A Fragile Legal Aid System
To spare undocumented or precarious-status immigrants from these ordeals, many community actors providing legal support are calling for more public funding.
Camille Bonenfant, a community organizer with the Clinique pour la justice migrante (CJM), says the clinic often has to turn people away due to capacity limits.
“We’re a team of eight, but only three lawyers provide legal representation. Right now, precarious and undocumented migrants are in urgent need of affordable legal support with access to legal aid certificates.”
She believes lawyers would be more willing to take these cases if public funding were better
Depending on their circumstances, precarious-status migrants may not always qualify for legal aid. “And the further along you are in the process, the harder it is to find a lawyer who’ll take you on with a legal aid mandate,” Bonenfant explains.
The structure of funding itself also affects service delivery. “The overall mission of these organizations isn’t funded,” says Louis-Philippe Jannard, coordinator of the Protection Division at the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes (TCRI). “That forces them to constantly search for new funding, because most projects are funded for one, two, maybe three years—rarely more. It adds a huge administrative burden, not just for fundraising but for reporting.”**
Despite the overburdened system, an immigration legal aid office that opened in Quebec City in 2023 was shut down on April 1 of this year.
“It leaves [immigrants] in a state of uncertainty and exposes them to various types of abuse and fraud. I’m thinking of people who pretend to be lawyers, or unscrupulous lawyers charging huge fees for poor-quality services.”
And yet, as Jannard points out, poor legal advice early in the immigration process can have serious consequences later. “Take someone who applies for asylum but gets bad advice. Their claim is denied. They have to appeal, maybe go to Federal Court. All those steps require even more complex legal services.”
“Like in many other sectors, we wait instead of acting early”
Changes to immigration rules or new legislation also greatly affect migrants trying to regularize their status, and these shifts pose serious challenges for those helping them navigate the system.
“Last fall, for instance, the rules changed around permanent residency for temporary work permit holders,” says Camille Bonenfant. “We’ve had more calls at the clinic. People saying, ‘I had a work permit. I lost it. What now? How can I stay here?’”
According to the researchers, the problem is a lack of political will. And this is despite a significant increase in temporary migration in recent years—particularly in Quebec, which now has around 600,000 non-permanent residents, compared to 420,000 the year before.
“We’re still stuck in this idea that these people are just here temporarily. They’re not here to stay. But the reality on the ground says otherwise. Even the Canadian government itself tells us that the vast majority of people with permanent residency today once had temporary status,” says Nakache.
The federal government had announced a regularization program for undocumented immigrants in 2024, but later scrapped it. According to Bonenfant, “That program would’ve helped thousands of people already living here, working here, with their families here.”
At the same time, the province is planning cuts and a freeze on permanent immigration programs for people already on Quebec soil. “Quebec’s immigration targets are really low. The proposed numbers are 25,000, 35,000, maybe 45,000 people a year,” notes Jannard.
Failing to help those already on the ground, Nakache believes, only creates more precarity and more irregularity. “And for those who do eventually manage to regularize their status, after years of hardship, it breeds frustration and disillusionment.”
A deep frustration Maria has been working through in therapy for the past four years. “If you’d met me six months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of this,” she admits. Now, her thoughts are with the next generation of immigrants, and those they’ll meet along the way.
“I want to raise awareness among professionals in institutions and nonprofit organizations, so they understand they’re dealing with people, not just numbers,” she concludes.