DEEP BREATH

Canada rebounds from opening loss at world junior tournament.

For weeks now, Canadian politicians, commentators and citizens — the entire country, in fact — have been giddy with self- admiration over the good deed they have done by accepting Syrian war refugees since the tragic images of two- year- old Alan Kurdi face down in the wash on a Turkish beach received global attention.

It is commendable that Canada has accepted several thousand Syrian refugees this year, including members of Kurdi’s family, who arrived in Canada on Monday, and that it has promised to take in as many as 50,000 over the next year or two. It is heartening to discover that many Canadians want to help the newcomers get here and to settle in.

But the orgy of congratulatory backslapping that has gripped the country for several months is way over the top. A little perspective is urgently required.

Based on its population and the size of its economy, Canada would have to accept about 670,000 refugees to match the compassion Sweden has shown over the past year. To be as welcoming as Germany, Canada would have to take in about 450,000 asylum seekers in a little over half a year. Even tiny Finland has put Canada to shame. With a population numbering about one- seventh that of Canada, Finland has accepted about 30,000 refugees since June. That would be like Canada taking in 210,000 refugees in seven months.

As for generosity, the “deals” offered to refugee claimants by Germany, Sweden and Finland vary greatly. But in general, the housing, medical and social benefits and educational opportunities that refugees can access in those countries are comparable to those t hat Canada provides.

Canada is also having great difficulty keeping the grand promises it has made. Only a fraction of the 25,000 refugees that were promised by year’s end during the election campaign has arrived. Bowing to the inevitable, the government earlier this month dramatically scaled back its commitment, declaring that only 10,000 refugees would arrive by Dec. 31. However, even with some artful legerdemain, the government is also unlikely to meet this greatly reduced target.

Left unsaid in the blitz of year- end stories about what a wonderful country Canada is for accepting the refugees, most of those who have made landfall in Toronto and Montreal since the election, were in the immigration/refugee pipeline long before the ballot. That is, these people were identified by the previous government, which has been heavily criticized for its coldhearted approach to the refugee crisis.

Nor has there been much attention paid to the fact that a large number of those who have arrived in Canada over the past few weeks are Chris- tians, although about 95 per cent of the eight or nine million Syrians displaced by the war are Muslims. The percentage of Muslims awaiting resettlement is also the same for the four million or so Syrians languishing in the camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon from which Canada has chosen to draw almost all of its refugees.

There is a lamentable disconnect between the sudden, publicly expressed desire of Canadians to help the refugees, and the grim fact that most Syrians have been in a terrible way and in need of urgent assistance for more than four years. Worst of all, perhaps, there still has been no serious discussion in Canada about how it might mitigate at source the suffering of the 40 million or so other Syrians and Iraqis whose lives had been ripped apart by the bloody ambitions and heinous crimes of the Assad regime and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and like- minded groups.

Par t of t he r eason f or Canada’s fantasy about how much it has helped Syria’s refugees likely arises from how little the U. S. has done to help out. This has no doubt been abetted lately by the attention that has been paid to Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s virulent Islamophobia. Trump’s outrageous trash talk has all owed many Canadians to feel as morally superior to Americans as they did during the Vietnam War and George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

I visited Sweden, Ger - many and Finland recently. Although arguably f aced with more daunting economic problems than Canadians confront today, lots of civic- minded people in those countries have also mobilized to assist refugees. But there has been a remarkable absence of the almost delirious self- congratulatory chest-beating that Canadians, safe behind the moat that is the Atlantic Ocean, have indulged in.

If Canada is to really become the progressive nation that many of its citizens earnestly believe it used to be, Canadians should demand that their new government bridge that moat. If Canada were to, say, pledge to take in several hundred thousand Syrians in 2015 — and actually keep to that promise instead of backsliding — it might end the current delusions about how much ( or how little) Canada has done to assist those who have managed to escape that bedlam.

As we all know, there will never be anything afoot in Ottawa that is nearly as dramatic as that. A more pertinent question is for how much longer will Canadians — who were very late to become interested in the plight of the Syrians — remain deeply moved by the fate of tiny Alan Kurdi or more than a relative handful of the millions of others now seeking safe haven from the violence and the disintegration of entire societies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa?

Whenever it is that Canada’s enthusiasm to assist asylum seekers begins to wane, Canadians will no doubt continue to cherish their misapprehensions about how uniquely unselfish and great- hearted their country is.

‘Canada would have to accept about 670,000 refugees to match the compassion Sweden has shown.’

— Columnist Matthew Fisher