2023 Universal Periodic Review of Canada

Create a coordinated federal, provincial and territorial mechanism to monitor and publicly report on implementation of UN human rights recommendations.

Collect and publish disaggregated equality data to track systemic discrimination affecting Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, persons with disabilities and people living in poverty.

Strengthen access to effective remedies through human rights institutions, courts and administrative bodies when governments fail to meet international human rights obligations.

Ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) and create independent inspection of all places of detention.

Adopt mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation for Canadian companies, including companies operating abroad.

Create a transparent national implementation and reporting mechanism for UPR and treaty body recommendations, including public mid-term reporting to Parliament and legislatures.

Strengthen legal remedies in Canada for victims of serious human rights abuses connected to Canadian companies or Canadian-supported activity abroad.

Protect human rights defenders affected by Canadian corporate activity, including defenders working on land, environment and Indigenous rights issues.

Ensure Canadian foreign, trade and development policies are assessed for consistency with international human rights obligations.

Guarantee equal access to quality education for Indigenous children, children with disabilities and children in low-income or remote communities.

Increase federal, provincial and territorial monitoring of education inequality, including disaggregated data on access, inclusion and outcomes.

Adopt education policies that address bullying, discrimination and exclusion in schools and ensure safe, inclusive learning environments.

Provide stable funding for trauma-informed legal, counselling, interpretation and housing supports for survivors of gender-based violence.

Amend family, immigration and criminal-law responses so survivors are not penalized for poverty, precarious status or inability to leave unsafe housing.

Ensure gender-based violence strategies address the needs of racialized, migrant, Indigenous, non-binary, intersex and Two-Spirit survivors.

End exclusion of off-reserve Status and Non-Status Indians, Metis and Southern Inuit peoples from Indigenous programs and policy processes.

Reform distinction-based federal policy so off-reserve Indigenous peoples have equitable access to housing, health, education and social supports.

Ensure consultation and co-development processes include representative organizations for off-reserve Indigenous peoples.

Adopt stronger federal and provincial strategies to prevent and respond to hate crimes, hate speech and online hate affecting South Asian communities.

Collect disaggregated data on racism, Islamophobia, caste discrimination and hate-motivated violence.

Fund community-led anti-racism education, victim supports and accountability mechanisms for affected racialized communities.

Guarantee unconditional access to safe housing, health care, legal aid and immigration protection for trafficked persons.

Reform labour and immigration enforcement so workers can report forced labour and exploitation without fear of deportation or retaliation.

Improve victim identification, national data collection and coordination across governments to address human trafficking.

Ensure the commitment to the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing under the National Housing Strategy Act is fully implemented.

Modernize the Social Union Framework Agreement to articulate shared federal, provincial and territorial commitments and obligations to realize economic, social and cultural rights.

Implement the Views of the UN Human Rights Committee in Toussaint v Canada and ensure victims of treaty body-identified violations can seek effective remedies in Canadian courts.

Create a national children's rights implementation mechanism to coordinate federal, provincial and territorial compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Repeal section 43 of the Criminal Code to remove the defence for corporal punishment of children.

Require child-rights impact assessments for laws, budgets and policies affecting children, with meaningful child and youth participation.

Provide stable public funding for specialized rehabilitation services for survivors of torture across Canada.

Ensure refugee claimants and newcomers who survived torture have timely access to trauma-informed health, mental health, interpretation and settlement supports.

Align immigration and detention practices with Canada's obligations under the Convention against Torture and the Refugee Convention.

Fully implement the Calls for Justice of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Adopt enforceable measures to address environmental racism, including community consultation, data collection and remedies for affected communities.

Strengthen national action on gender-based violence, including prevention, shelter access and culturally appropriate supports.

Decriminalize simple drug possession and expand evidence-based harm reduction services, including in prisons.

Reform sex work laws to protect sex workers' safety, labour rights and access to health and social services.

Limit HIV non-disclosure criminalization to cases of intentional transmission and remove discriminatory impacts on Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ2S+ and women's communities.

Ratify outstanding international human rights instruments, including OPCAT and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Adopt binding corporate accountability legislation requiring Canadian companies to prevent and remedy human rights harms abroad.

Limit use of section 33 of the Charter and ensure the notwithstanding clause is not used to shield laws from effective rights review and remedies.

Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery in Canadian law and policy and remove its effects from land, title and recognition frameworks.

Recognize Indigenous peoples' self-determination, title and jurisdiction without discriminatory status-based limitations.

Ensure Canadian law and negotiations fully respect Indigenous peoples' free, prior and informed consent.

Adopt a rights-based poverty eradication strategy with measurable targets, timelines and accountability mechanisms.

Increase income supports so people can meet basic needs, including food, housing, health care and transportation.

Ensure poverty reduction policies are designed with people experiencing poverty and address systemic causes rather than short-term relief alone.

Protect freedom of religion and belief in law and public policy, including for minority faith communities.

Strengthen conscience protections for individuals and institutions in health care and other public settings.

Adopt stronger safeguards for vulnerable persons in laws and policies affecting life, disability and end-of-life decision-making.

Repeal section 43 of the Criminal Code to prohibit corporal punishment of children in all settings.

Adopt public education and parent-support programs promoting non-violent discipline.

Ensure child protection, education and family-law systems treat corporal punishment as a children's rights issue.

Implement a comprehensive national 2SLGBTQI action plan with enforceable measures across health, education, employment, housing and justice systems.

Ensure trans, non-binary and intersex people have equal access to affirming health care, identity documents and public services.

Collect disaggregated data and fund community-led responses to anti-2SLGBTQI hate, violence and discrimination.

Protect reproductive health access, including abortion and contraception, as part of equal and evidence-based public health care.

Ensure public services and publicly funded institutions operate consistently with secular and non-discriminatory human rights standards.

Remove policy barriers that allow religious objections to undermine equal access to health and social services.

Repatriate Canadian citizens arbitrarily detained in northeast Syria, including children and people held in camps or prisons.

Adopt clear rights-based procedures for consular protection, family unity and rehabilitation of returnees from northeast Syria.

Strengthen corporate accountability, Indigenous rights protection and disability rights safeguards in line with Canada's international obligations.

Sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

End Canadian policy support for nuclear deterrence and align security policy with the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.

Support victim assistance, environmental remediation and international cooperation for communities harmed by nuclear weapons testing and use.

Reform national security and anti-terrorism laws to prevent racial, religious and political profiling.

Strengthen independent oversight, transparency and remedies for watchlists, information sharing and surveillance activities.

Ensure counterterrorism financing and listing regimes do not chill humanitarian work, dissent, association or political expression.

Adopt stronger measures to prevent Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslim communities and immigrants.

Protect religious and cultural sites, practices and communities from hate-motivated attacks and harassment.

Ensure immigration and integration policies support equal participation and protection from discrimination.

Strengthen national measures to prevent violence against women and ensure access to shelters, legal supports and health services.

Improve women's equal participation in political, economic, social and cultural life.

Collect gender-disaggregated data and fund programs that address poverty, discrimination and barriers facing women in vulnerable situations.

Improve access to health care, education and social supports for Indigenous children and communities.

Adopt stronger environmental protections affecting Indigenous peoples' health, land and culture.

Implement child-rights and Indigenous-rights recommendations through measurable federal, provincial and territorial action plans.

Apply refugee and temporary protection measures without discrimination based on nationality, race or ethnicity.

Provide Afghan refugees and other displaced groups with protection pathways comparable to those created for Ukrainians fleeing conflict.

Ensure emergency migration programs include equal access to settlement services, work authorization and family reunification.

Require free, prior and informed consent before approving extractive or infrastructure projects affecting Indigenous lands.

Align climate policy with Canada's human rights obligations and reduce support for projects that worsen climate harm.

Provide effective remedies for Indigenous peoples and communities affected by environmental damage and resource extraction.

Embed economic and social rights, including housing and income security, in legislation, policy design and budgeting.

Ensure income supports are adequate to protect people from poverty and allow a dignified standard of living.

Create accessible accountability mechanisms and remedies for failures to realize the rights to housing and income security.

Fully implement the MMIWG Calls for Justice with Indigenous women-led monitoring and accountability.

Provide stable funding for Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit, transgender and gender-diverse people's housing, health, safety and justice supports.

Reform child welfare, policing and justice systems to address systemic discrimination against Indigenous women and families.

Adopt stronger anti-discrimination measures addressing Islamophobia, racism and discrimination against immigrants and Indigenous peoples.

Improve access to housing, health care, education and social services for vulnerable and marginalized groups.

Create transparent monitoring of Canada's implementation of accepted UPR recommendations.

Implement the National Housing Strategy Act as an enforceable human rights framework for the progressive realization of adequate housing.

Adopt urgent rights-based measures to address homelessness and encampments, including alternatives to forced eviction.

Regulate financialization of housing and ensure federal housing investments prioritize people in greatest need.

Include urban Indigenous peoples and Friendship Centres in Indigenous policy co-development and funding decisions.

Provide equitable, long-term funding for urban Indigenous housing, health, child welfare, justice and cultural supports.

End exclusionary distinctions-based approaches that deny urban Indigenous people access to services and self-determination.

Adopt stronger government accountability for systemic discrimination in housing, education, policing, health, disability and poverty-related systems.

Collect and use disaggregated human rights data to identify and remedy systemic inequality.

Ensure provincial and municipal laws, policies and services comply with the Ontario Human Rights Code and international human rights obligations.

Fund Indigenous women-led programs addressing violence, housing, health, child welfare, justice and economic security.

Implement reconciliation commitments and MMIWG Calls for Justice with accountability to Indigenous women and communities.

Ensure urban Indigenous women and girls can access culturally grounded services regardless of status or residence.

Preserve and provide access to records needed to identify missing Indigenous children and unmarked graves connected to residential schools.

Adopt legal and policy measures addressing enforced disappearance, truth, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition.

Support Indigenous-led truth, memory and reconciliation processes, including access to archives and reparative measures.

End solitary confinement in all forms, including practices that replicate isolation through Structured Intervention Units or lockdowns.

Ratify OPCAT and establish independent inspection of prisons, jails and other detention facilities.

Address Indigenous and Black over-incarceration through decarceration strategies, community alternatives and binding correctional oversight.

Adopt a comprehensive strategy to address anti-Black racism in education, policing, justice, employment, housing and public institutions.

Collect and publish disaggregated race-based data to measure and remedy anti-Black racism.

Fund Black community-led institutions, services and accountability mechanisms in Ottawa-Gatineau and across Canada.

Provide stable funding for specialized rehabilitation services for survivors of torture in British Columbia and across Canada.

Ensure refugees and refugee claimants who survived torture have timely access to mental health care, interpretation and settlement supports.

Protect refugee claimants from policies that undermine rehabilitation, safety or access to Canada's protection system.

Maintain sex-disaggregated data collection in law, policy and public services.

Preserve sex-based protections for women and girls in spaces, services, sport and programs where sex matters to equality or safety.

Ensure consultation on gender policy includes women's organizations concerned with sex-based rights.

Adopt stronger safeguards in medical assistance in dying laws to protect persons with disabilities and other vulnerable people from coercion or lack of supports.

Strengthen measures to prevent human trafficking, sexual exploitation and children's exposure to pornography.

Protect freedom of religion, conscience and belief in public policy and service delivery.

Align Canadian foreign policy with international human rights and humanitarian law, including in relation to Palestine.

End Canadian support for policies or actions abroad that contribute to discrimination, occupation, sanctions-related harm or rights violations.

Ensure domestic anti-racism and foreign-policy measures protect advocacy for Palestinian rights and other international human rights causes.

Guarantee equitable access to abortion, contraception and sexual and reproductive health services across Canada.

Provide comprehensive sexuality education and gender-based violence prevention that includes women, girls, 2SLGBTQI people, migrants and people with disabilities.

Remove immigration, cost, geography and discrimination barriers to sexual and reproductive health care.

Improve access to health, social and community supports for older persons, persons with disabilities and people with mental health disabilities.

Ensure Indigenous peoples, including those in remote communities, have equitable access to services and culturally appropriate supports.

Adopt inclusive policies that prevent isolation, discrimination and institutional neglect of vulnerable groups.

Adopt and fund an Inuit-centred plan to eliminate the shortage of adequate housing in Nunavik.

Address overcrowding and inadequate housing as systemic discrimination affecting health, culture, family life and equality.

Ensure housing programs for Nunavik are designed with Inuit participation and include clear timelines, resources and accountability.

Strengthen federal and provincial action plans to monitor and combat antisemitism.

Ensure public institutions, education systems and civil society funding programs address antisemitic hate and discrimination consistently.

Improve data collection, education and accountability for hate incidents affecting Jewish communities.

Decriminalize sex work by repealing criminal provisions that target sex workers, clients, third parties and advertising.

Ensure sex workers have access to labour protections, occupational health and safety, housing, health care and police protection without criminalization.

Centre sex workers, including migrant, Indigenous, Black, trans and street-based sex workers, in law reform and policy design.

Create a national mechanism to implement and monitor UN treaty body recommendations on women's human rights.

Eliminate remaining sex discrimination in the Indian Act and remedy its impacts on First Nations women and descendants.

Strengthen federal, provincial and territorial accountability for women's housing, poverty, social assistance, violence prevention and access to justice.

Adopt targeted measures to address anti-Black racism in Quebec health, immigration, judicial and carceral systems.

Collect disaggregated race-based data and create accountability mechanisms for institutions affecting Black communities.

Ensure Black migrants and workers have access to health care, labour protection, immigration justice and remedies for discrimination.

Join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and end support for nuclear deterrence policies.

Adopt climate policies consistent with human rights obligations and the protection of present and future generations.

Increase transparency and accountability for Canadian nuclear, military and climate policies that affect rights to life, health and a healthy environment.

Fully implement the National Housing Strategy Act commitment to the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing.

Provide effective remedies for homelessness, inadequate housing and forced evictions through the Federal Housing Advocate and Review Panels.

Ensure federal housing programs prioritize people in greatest need and prevent encampment evictions without adequate rights-compliant alternatives.

Adopt mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation for Canadian companies operating abroad.

Ensure affected communities and human rights defenders can access Canadian courts for harms linked to Canadian corporate activity.

Strengthen protection for environmental and human rights defenders facing threats, criminalization or retaliation connected to Canadian extractive projects.

Withdraw Canada's support for continued operation of Enbridge Line 5 where it threatens Indigenous rights, waters and climate obligations.

Ensure affected Anishinaabe Nations participate in any Line 5 negotiations or proceedings and that their free, prior and informed consent is respected.

Interpret the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty and related Canadian positions consistently with Indigenous peoples' human rights and environmental protection.

Implement Indigenous rights commitments, including UNDRIP, the TRC Calls to Action and the MMIWG Calls for Justice.

Withdraw from or reform the Safe Third Country Agreement and end immigration detention practices that violate refugee and migrant rights.

Adopt stronger anti-Black racism, migrant worker, housing and poverty measures grounded in human rights obligations.

Reform the federal Access to Information Act to reduce delays, narrow exemptions and strengthen the public interest override.

Expand access-to-information coverage to ministers' offices, Parliament, courts and publicly funded bodies where appropriate.

Strengthen the Information Commissioner's enforcement powers and protect whistleblowers who disclose public-interest information.

Strengthen safeguards in medical assistance in dying laws to protect persons with disabilities, people in poverty and people lacking adequate care.

Protect conscience rights for health care professionals and institutions.

Adopt stronger legal protection for the right to life in relation to abortion and end-of-life decision-making.

Adopt a national action plan to eliminate racialized poverty with enforceable targets and timelines.

Collect and publish disaggregated race-based data across housing, employment, income, immigration, policing, health and education systems.

Ensure anti-racism strategies include remedies for systemic discrimination affecting Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities.

Regulate Canadian petroleum companies operating in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru through binding human rights and environmental due diligence.

Ensure communities harmed by Canadian petroleum projects can access effective remedies in Canada.

Protect Indigenous and community land, water and environmental rights from abuses connected to Canadian extractive activity.

Adopt extraterritorial accountability measures for Canadian companies involved in extractive and energy projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Provide access to Canadian judicial and non-judicial remedies for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant and fishing communities harmed abroad.

Require Canadian companies and financiers to prevent and remedy human rights and environmental harms throughout their operations and supply chains.

Regulate Canadian mining and oil companies whose projects threaten Indigenous peoples and ecosystems in the Amazon rainforest.

Ensure Canadian climate and corporate policies prevent deforestation, biodiversity loss and rights violations in the Amazon.

Provide effective remedies and protection for Amazonian peoples affected by Canadian corporate activity.

Adopt a feminist peace policy that reduces militarism and redirects resources toward social, climate and human security.

Join nuclear disarmament efforts, including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Strengthen controls on arms exports and ensure Canadian military and security policy complies with women's rights and peace obligations.

Implement the UN Human Rights Committee's Views in Toussaint v Canada, including effective remedies for the violation found.

Ensure people with irregular migration status have access to essential health care necessary to protect life and non-discrimination.

Create a domestic legal route for victims of treaty body-identified human rights violations to seek implementation and remedies in Canadian courts.

Accelerate implementation of reconciliation measures, including responses to unmarked graves and violence against Indigenous women.

Strengthen protection for migrants and people displaced by disasters, including limits on detention and rights-based support.

Address gender-based violence through prevention, services, accountability and culturally appropriate supports.

Continue implementing OSCE human dimension commitments on elections, democratic participation, equality and non-discrimination.

Ensure election laws and practices protect equal participation, accessibility and public confidence.

Strengthen measures addressing intolerance, discrimination and barriers to participation for marginalized communities.