CRS Seminar: ‘Bad’ Bodies, Borders and Un-Belonging: Conversations about Medical Inadmissibility
November 25, 2025
1:00pm - 2:30pm
This is a virtual event
Zoom: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/fDhf7wLMTwu7dFGJXoeAoQ
Guest speakers: Laura Bisaillon, University of Toronto; Clifford Pereira, University of Hong Kong; Valentina Capurri, Toronto Metropolitan University; Anne-Rachelle Boulanger, Policy Analyst and Immigration and Refugee Lawyer, Felipe Montoya-Greenheck, York University
With World AIDS Day approaching on December 1st, this conversation convenes scholars, advocates, and people with first-hand experience of immigration exclusion to reflect on Canada’s “excessive demand” regime – laws, policies and professional and bureaucratic practices that converge to exclude would-be migrant persons based on medical diagnosis.
Building on evidence and lines of analysis proffered in Bisaillon’s Screening Out (2022), Boulanger’s constitutional challenge, Capurri’s Not Good Enough for Canada (2019), Montoya’s legal activism and principled stance against exceptionalism and, Pereira’s experience with being initially excluded from permanent settlement, this discussion explores how ideas such as “health,” “burden,” and “risk” have been enacted since the 19th century in Canada, thus render problematic and undesirable migrant people with chronic illness and genetic and developmental otherness. Spotlighted are the ways in which the latter have pushed and continue to push for change through cooperative research, advocacy, and testimony.
Together, the four panelists and their commentor will consider what progress has been made on legal reform, identify areas of persistent inequity, offer ideas for change, and encourage and invite attendees to think alongside them – all with the aim of creating an immigration system organized by relations of therapeutic care and decency rather than prejudice and violence.
Bios
Laura Bisaillon is a CRS affiliated scholar, sociologist and University of Toronto professor whose scholarship questions interactions between law, medicine, regulation, disablism and everyday life. She investigates how lay, expert and bureaucratic forms of knowledge converge, with a specific focus on the social study of professional power, organizational practices, notions of risk, and processes of knowledge production in the medico-legal borderlands. Her book Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience (University of British Columbia, 2022) and film The Unmaking of Medical Inadmissibility (2020) inform legal research, education and reform related to Canada’s “excessive demand” provision.
Anne-Rachelle Boulanger is a lawyer and policy analyst at the HIV Legal Network, where she leads the organization’s immigration work, including a constitutional challenge to Canada’s medical inadmissibility and “excessive demand” regime. She also directs initiatives to improve shelter accessibility for people who use drugs, oversees national research on health and harm reduction in prisons, and collaborates with the Global Fund to advance youth access to sexual and reproductive health services. Her work sits at the intersection of law, health, and human rights, with a focus on addressing structural inequities that shape access to care and protection.
Valentina Capurri is an instructor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. She holds a BA and an MA in History from Italy’s Universita’ di Bologna and an MA in Geography and a PhD in History from York University. She has over a decade of experience teaching at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research interests are in geopolitics, citizenship and identity, urban geography, and immigration and disability studies in the Canadian context. She is author of Not Good Enough for Canada (University of Toronto, 2019).
Clifford (Cliff) Pereira is a historical geographer, researcher, curator and heritage consultant with a portfolio of projects in Britain, Canada, Qatar, Kenya, China and Hong Kong. His MA thesis in History was about Africa and the African Diaspora. Alongside his career in heritage, he was Chair for Harbour Trust, a service provider for people with HIV in Southeast London, England. From 2006 to 2013, he led the Trust’s incorporation into Metro Charity, which provides sexual health services and mental health services while celebrating equality and diversity. He is presently based in Hong Kong SAR, China.
Felipe Montoya-Greenheck is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. In 2016, his family was deemed inadmissible for Canadian permanent residency because it was decided that their son, Nicolas, who lives with Down syndrome, should be excluded. The logic was that hypothetical future costs of this care would impose “excessive demand” to public services. Felipe challenged the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act “excessive demand” provision legally. In 2017, this clause was amended but not eliminated. He continues with the struggle of having prejudicial, medicalized assumptions removed from the immigration system. The Montoya’s would contemplate returning to Canada when the medical exclusion regime is abolished.
Co-sponsors
