LIBERALS NEED TO GET SERIOUS ON BORDER CROSSINGS.
President Donald Trump finally seemed to flinch on Wednesday, backing away from his administration’s barbaric mass child-snatching at the Mexican border and ordering that asylum-seeking parents be detained with any children they might have with them. That policy may or may not be legal, but it’s certainly less awful and less offside international norms: Canada detained 151 children with their parents in 2017, CBC News reports. It also may or may not last. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally criticized the situation on Wednesday. “Obviously, this is not the way we do things in Canada,” he said. But he’s facing stronger-thanever calls to take concrete action on Canada’s own border policies — most notably to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which bars most people in the United States from making an asylum claim at an official border crossing and thus encourages them to cross irregularly, and sometimes dangerously. Even former Conservative immigration minister Chris Alexander has joined the chorus tweeting “Yes,” to the question “Should Canada end the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S.?”
Certainly the logical case for scrapping the STCA has never been stronger. The pretext of the agreement, struck in 2002, is that the Canadian and American refugee-determination systems are similar enough, and each sufficiently robust, to justify forcing people to seek asylum in the first of the two countries they arrive in. In reality, it was Washington doing a favour for the Chrétien Liberals, who didn’t want to deal with a surge in northbound asylum claims that began after the 9/11 attacks. But read on its own terms, it doesn’t work in 2018. Systematic government child abduction is — or was, one hopes — the most spectacular policy difference between the Canadian and American systems, but there are others. Notably incarceration rates for claimants are vastly higher, and growing, south of the border.
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government have earned Canada a welldeserved reputation as a humane refuge for the forcibly displaced. And Canadians, in communities across the land, have opened their hearts and their homes to sponsor and support refugees,” former Liberal cabinet ministers Allan Rock and Lloyd Axworthy burbled in The Globe and Mail this week, arguing to suspend the STCA. “Let’s make sure that our policies at the border reflect ‘the Canadian way’ and are worthy of the values we cherish.”
Weirdly absent from their piece, and from many others, was any mention of the total hash Trudeau’s government has made of handling irregular bordercrossers thus far.
The logistical challenges are understandable: For example, Toronto’s homeless shelters are on track to be 50-per-cent occupied by asylum seekers, and the city can’t hope to find them all more-permanent options in the midst of a pre-existing housing crisis. It’s unclear where hundreds of refugee claimants currently put up in college dormitories will wind up once school is back in. The solutions might not be pretty — but that isn’t a situation of Ottawa’s making.
The main problem, which is of Ottawa’s making, is the length of time these people are going to have to wait in limbo. The average processing time has skyrocketed from a few months to an estimated 21/2 years, and it took far too long for the government to react. The 2018 budget has money for 50 new claims adjudicators; Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen pledges this will increase annual capacity by 17,000 cases. But if the monthly average of irregular crossers so far in 2018 keeps up, they will add up to something like 23,000 — not even enough to keep up with new arrivals, in other words, let alone clear the backlog.
That backlog reached its lowest point this century in 2015, at just over 16,000. As of March 31, 2018, it was 51,910.
It’s tough to guess how much more of a burden scrapping the STCA might
NOT EVEN ENOUGH TO KEEP UP WITH NEW ARRIVALS.
place on the system. It doesn’t seem to be acting as a powerful deterrent at the well-worn crossing in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que. But it sure won’t lessen the burden.
You can’t claim to be an admirable safe haven for the world’s most imperilled people if you leave them hanging for three or four or five years as to whether they’ll be able to stay. Well, I say “can’t” — Canadians are expert at boasting of virtues not backed by evidence. You shouldn’t.
Nor can you count on Canadians remaining sanguine about accepting thousands of refugees who are arriving without permission. Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault, who is likely to be the province’s next premier, has argued lax rules at the border have shaken “the generosity and solidarity of Quebecers with respect to refugees.”
Moreover, vastly quickening processing times is a virtuous cycle: the faster people get the thumbs up or thumbs down, the less incentive there is for no-hope claimants to take a cynical gamble. The opposite is true too, and that’s very much where we seem to be headed.
In short, this situation doesn’t just require the Liberals to be true to “the Canadian way” and fix an injustice with the stroke of a pen. It requires them, at long last, to actually get serious.