Is deporting Abdi the Canadian thing to do?

At the core of Canadian national identity lies a non-attribute. Canadians are not Americans and, for most, that is a source or pride.

Our Un-americanism is rooted in the belief that we are more tolerant, somehow a kinder if not a gentler nation. So, when circumstances assault our consciousness to challenge this self-image they are dismissed or diminished, while a precious few seek their redress.

Such is the case of Abdoul Abdi, a young man who spent 18 of his 24 years as a Canadian in all but citizenship and now faces deportation to Somalia, a land that is as foreign to him as it is to Premier Stephen Mcneil.

Abdi arrived in Nova Scotia a six-year-old refugee, and had the misfortune of falling into the custody of the province’s child welfare system. He wound up in foster care, was moved 31 times in 10 years, separated from his sister and his aunt, and not surprisingly didn’t get far in school.

The young man stole a car, assaulted a police office, went to jail and many Canadians see that as just cause to send him “home” to Somalia. Except “home” is Canada, and his criminal activity is characteristic of kids who grow up in the care of the province, not his precarious nationality.

Right now, in the USA the plight of as many as two million young people whose history resembles Abdi’s is a bargaining chip Republican law-makers are playing to get the infamous wall funded.

The symbolic centre of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency, the wall is needed to secure America’s southern border, say GOP politicians. The wall, in fact binds the edifice of Trump’s electoral core, who heard him say, not “make America great again,” but “make American white again.”

In the US, children who arrived in America illegally receive protection from deportation under DACA (deferred action for children arrivals). DACA expires in March, and the Republican-controlled congress will gladly renew it, provided Democrats support the damned wall.

Abdoul Abdi’s arrival in Canada was perfectly legal, but he has little protection as he awaits a deportation hearing scheduled to precede his lawyer’s last best chance to save him, which is a legal challenge based on the Charter and international law.

Abdi’s legal guardian could have applied for, and certainly gained, Canadian citizenship for the child refugee, but his legal guardian was the Province of Nova Scotia, which overlooked that detail, thus providing the Great White North an opportunity to get one man whiter.

Otherwise well-informed Canadians, in a chorus led by the Prime Minister, will decry reference to Abdi’s skin pigmentation as unjust. This has absolutely nothing to do with race, they will protest, because it never does, so they always do.

Abdi is not being deported because he is a black man, but didn’t his ethnicity factor in the bleak childhood and adolescence Canada and Nova Scotia provided him? Most black Nova Scotians are certain it did, while most white Canadians are, at best, unsure. The former group, for once, enjoys the advantage which, in this case, is the credibility that comes from shared experience, so as a journalist or a jury we must side with that experience.

The province at least recognizes a problem here, and Premier Mcneil has instructed the Department of Community Services to review how it deals with complex child welfare cases. That may save a kid in the future, but does nothing for Abdi, nor does the province see a role for itself in his plight. “It’s not our job,” was the position staked out by the department’s deputy minister this week, although not in those misquoted words.

And so, a young man who came to Canada as a parentless child of six, with a sister and aunt from whom he was separated and bounced around to, on average, three different homes per year, faces deportation to a failed state where, again on average, he can expect to live to the ripe old age of 55.

Somalia ranks 217th among the least privileged nations of the world in life expectancy; Canada, 17th, among a group of wealthy nations where citizens live, on average, to be 82.

Avoid all travel to Somalia, warns the federal government’s current travel advisory. “If you are currently in Somalia despite this advisory, you should leave immediately.” Unless, of course, you were a six-year-old boy who came to Canada, a land of hope and generosity, and found less.