Canada should stop locking up migrant children

If it’s not OK for the U.S., it’s not OK for Canada

It is nice at least that we can still be shocked by things in the United States. This is the sole positive observation that can be made about the grotesqueness of little migrant kids being put in cages.

What is odd and not so positive is that the imprisonment of migrant children in Canada does not spark much widespread indignation here. I don’t mean to suggest that because we lock some kids up too we are as bad as the United States. I only mean to say that because we think of ourselves as far less gruesome, even a lesser amount of gruesomeness might be expected to shock us into action.

But here we are: Locking up little refugee kids and feeling fine. When they cross a border in a way we don’t like, which for some of us is any way whatsoever, we may lock up parents and may lock up their kids too.

Again, it is different. The kids in the United States are reportedly forced to wake up to murals of Donald Trump’s face, for one thing, painted in a style reminiscent of old superhero comic book covers if old superhero comic book covers always featured only the villain instead of the hero.

And these are the lucky kids, for another, at least they get walls.

Trump is reportedly considering building tent cities to hold all the children he wants to detain. The children must not be called refugees for fear that would give them rights, but there is nothing stopping the United States from making them live like refugees.

Then there is the scale: Hundreds a year in

Why is jailing migrant kids a condition that one improves upon rather than kills dead.

Canada, thousands by the month in the United States. But again, it’s also the same: We sometimes lock up little migrant kids.

At least our government decided last year that it would try to do much better on jailing migrant children.

As a rule, it would try not to do it as often; in fact, it would try not to do it at all. It would try to keep children with their parents and try to put the best interests of the child first. That’s what it said in a ministerial directive in November, which gives policy guidance to those providing government services.

And it is true that things were getting better even before our government guided immigration officials to stop doing this terrible thing. It says that in 2016-2017, Canada detained 162 minors in holding centres.

That’s about 20 per cent less than the year before, and 30 per cent less than the year before that. Conditions are improving in the area of jailing migrant kids.

This would all be worth celebrating, were it not for this: Why is jailing migrant kids a condition that one improves upon rather than kills dead with as forceful a blow as can be administered? Why are we issuing guidance around it rather than abolishing it in law?

We don’t order ministerial directives for public servants not to murder people. We have laws banning murder.

Canada needs to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which is vague enough in its wording about detaining children as a “last resort” to ensure that children are detained when many other resorts are, in fact, available. This amendment should never have needed to be made, it should have been made before now, it should be made now.

Not that directives are entirely useless. We have never required Trump to feel smug about the state of Canada, so perhaps the sole positive contribution of his idiotic, kleptocratic administration to us is that it operates as a sure directive of how not to behave. Whatever it does is not merely an opportunity for us to feel good about the ways in which we may be similar but superior. It gives us dependable guidance to act strongly and swiftly in precisely the opposite manner.

Shannon Gormley is an Ottawa Citizen global affairs columnist and freelance journalist.