No abstract

While serving as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada between 2008 and 2013, Jason Kenney likened the detention facilities used to house an increasing number of asylum seekers and non-status migrants to hotels. And yet, when addressing the responsibilities of citizenship, he repeatedly argued that “Canada is not a hotel.” However contradictory, Kenney’s references to hotels and, implicitly, to the comforts and privileges they represent, draw on the idea of Canadian hospitality: the suggestion is that we detain asylum seekers in hotels or hotel-like conditions because we are an hospitable people but that our reputation for hospitality leaves us vulnerable to migrants who construe themselves as hotel guests with privileges rather than citizens with responsibilities. Paying particular attention to recent legislative reforms that will almost certainly result in the incarceration of more asylum seekers, this article asks how Canadian hospitality is defined and practiced today. More generally, it uses discourse analysis to explore the tension between the Canadian ideal of hospitality and the realities of an expanding immigration detention system.

Hospitalization in a critical care setting has multiple effects on patients and their families. For patients, it can be a frightening and dehumanizing experience, while families are confronted with stressors that can disrupt normal family functioning. The nurse is the pivotal figure in the health care system who can positively affect family coping through the support offered. With family needs met, they are then strengthened and able to support their family member. This article examines the roles and relationships of families, social support systems, and nurses. Through the framework of social support, nurses provide emotional, instrumental, spiritual, and appraisal assistances to families. This can potentially positively affect the family’s adaptation to a stressful situation, and thus the family’s ability to provide support to the patient. A case study analysis is described to illustrate the interactions and interventions through a model of family support

In December 2013, Lucia Jimenez was caught paying less than the full fare for a public transit ticket. An undocumented Mexican national, Jimenez was taken into custody by the Canadian Border Services Agency. She hanged herself shortly thereafter. Following Jimenez’s death, a friend argued, “Lucia ended up being a ghost here.” Like so many non-status migrants for whom banal daily rituals—like accessing public transit—are dangerous, Jimenez practiced a necessary invisibility. But it wasn’t until her undocumented status came to light that she really disappeared: she entered the state’s “apparatus of disappearance, and vanished in plain sight” (Nield).  Given the technologies of surveillance at work in detention facilities, it seems counterintuitive to constitute them as places where one can vanish, but such is the case in Canada, where there is no upper limit on the length of immigration detention. Tings Chak takes up these issues in her 2015 graphic essay, Undocumented: the Architecture of Migrant Detention, arguing that there is a pressing need “to make visible the sites and stories of detention.” With attention to Chak’s book and to the circumstances surrounding Jimenez’s death, this essay takes up the call to instigate a public conversation about immigration detention in Canada.