Would they get in today?

A new book by Ratna Omidvar and Dana Wagner chronicles the journeys of 30 refugees who escaped strife and found asylum in Canada, at various, more welcoming, times in our country’s past

Canada’s refugee system has undergone a revolution by a decade of incremental changes. The policy and legal shifts are complex and frankly tedious.

The tragedy is that this minutiae — that begs us to glaze over and scroll past — has the potential to alter lives. It’s only human stories that breathe life into paper changes. Until we see the impact on individual lives, we can’t tell what is fair or punitive, reasonable or cruel, good or bad for Canada.

The 30 people we interviewed in Flight and Freedom personify the large and small ways that refugees enrich Canada. They are engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, nurses, parents, and community leaders.

Would they get in to Canada today? Some would, some likely would not. For many, the answer is, “It depends.”

Sabreen arrived in 2006 from Israel to claim asylum. From a so-called “safe country,” she would have a condensed timeline of 15 days to gather evidence for her claim. She would likely be refused and returned to face murder by her family. Ken Do arrived as a child in 1980, plucked from an island camp in Indonesia after escaping Vietnam by boat. There would be no special program as existed then, and if there was, the magnitude would be closer to 5,000 instead of 60,000 refugees. It’s a similar story for Andrew Hidi. Over 37,000 Hungarians arrived following the 1956 revolution after Canada’s immigration minister flew to Vienna to personally organize the evacuation. Robi Botos claimed asylum in 1998, again from a “safe country.” He almost got deported then, and would likely be successfully deported today faster than an alternative route to protection could begin.

Hypotheticals carry imperfect certainty. But what is true today is that whether refugees seek protection overseas or within our borders, Canada is a less friendly place than we like to think.