History should teach, not lecture
Justin Trudeau’s incessant contrition has been tiresome but, to this point, relatively benign.
If you are a gay man or woman drummed out of the public service, the descendant of Sikhs turned away on the Komagata Maru, a survivor of Newfoundland’s residential schools or a member of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation, which saw six of its chiefs hanged in 1864, the prime minister’s rendering of a tear-stained formal apology may have offered some comfort.
But with news the government will formally apologize for Canada’s 1939 decision to turn away the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 907 German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime, Trudeau has gone beyond merely apologizing for things that happened long before he was born.
This particular apology is being used to justify and exonerate current (failing) government policy on migrants crossing into Canada from the U.S.
Omar Alghabra, the parliamentary secretary to the trade minister, tweeted that Canada must reconcile its promotion of human rights globally with mistakes made at home. “We turned away asylum seekers without giving them due process and dignity. We must learn from our history.”
The tweet provoked a storm from people accusing him of making a direct historical comparison between the Holocaust and the fate facing today’s “irregular” migrants.
Alghabra denied he was equating the two but his insistence that “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” suggests he sees parallels.
Leaving aside the propensity of this government to use serial selfflagellation as an instrument of political image-management, this particular offering of remorse is designed to exploit a tragic moral failure by a previous government to bolster support for the appalling managerial shortcomings of this one.
Alghabra is, of course, correct that asylum seekers are protected by the Charter. Due process is not a choice.
But neither should it be indefinite and this government has made a complete mess of managing a refugee system that is experiencing a surge of claimants it is not equipped to manage.
The Liberals have to take some action to close the loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement that allows claims to be made by people who would be otherwise ineligible.
But, beyond the border, the Liberals have made changes that have put pressure on the system.
Visa requirements for Mexicans and Czechs, imposed because of concerns about bogus claims, were lifted.
Since 2013, the number of claimants has quadrupled and the backlog more than doubled, as floods of Haitians and Nigerians were attracted by word that Canada was an easy touch.
The author of an independent review of the system, former senior public servant Neil Yeates, talked about a “failure of finality” that created a “pull” factor for asylum seekers.
A system with operating funds to handle 22,500 refugee claims annually is now being asked to process more than twice that number.
At the same time, the number of failed claimants returned to their country of origin has fallen by three quarters (in 2012-13, 14,490 were removed; in 2016-17 that number was just 3,892).
The Toronto Star reported Monday that only 398 of 32,173 people who crossed the U.S. border illegally have been deported since April 2017.
Most are still waiting for their asylum claims to be heard. Of the 398 failed refugee claimants, 146 were sent back to the U.S., where 116 have citizenship.
A Global News story about the backstories of Nigerian claimants in Montreal illustrates why linking the St. Louis to the current migrant story is unconscionable, particularly if the intent is to manipulate sympathy for the 254 people who ended up being killed.
Global quoted “David” (not his real name), a 74-year-old who has been waiting eight years to settle his status in Canada and who wants to bring over his wife and six children. In the meantime, he is on government assistance.
The reporter also spoke to “Eric,” who arrived in February.
He complained about herdsmen from the north of the country who threatened southern farmers, sometimes murdering them.
That might have been the basis for a decent refugee claim but the story revealed that Eric, who arrived with his wife and two kids, is in fact not a southern farmer but a banker who received his master’s degree in Britain.
A reasonable candidate for an ordered immigration application he may be; a genuine refugee he patently is not.
To suggest that all asylum seekers are in the same dismal boat as those who sailed aboard the MS St. Louis is deliberately misleading.
The debate about whether it should be the purpose of the government to right the past will continue.
But there should be no argument about the use of those apologies to further the government’s agenda.