What’s really wrong with UN’s migration pact

Ottawa is getting set to sign Canada onto another showy international agreement, the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration. You’ve probably heard of it in recent days because certain rightwing commentators in Canada and abroad seem rather agitated about it.

The agitation is fairly overblown. The compact isn’t worth defending, and we’ll get to why it’s a bad idea in a moment. But despite what you may have heard, it wouldn’t actually compel Canada to demobilize our border guards and welcome caravans of migrants across our border to set up camp in Winnipeg. The non-binding agreement is typical of documents of the sort: dozens of pages of progressive fluff that will be signed with great fanfare, celebrated with the mandatory cocktail parties, immediately ignored by all the signatories and then essentially forgotten about.

The general goal of the compact — safer and more humane lives for migrants and refugees — is fine. But the grim reality, as is always the case with international law, is that the countries that would bother to adhere to the compact are already treating migrants with proper concern for the rule of law. Canada, for example. And those countries apt to treat migrants poorly won’t be much impressed by yet another paper-shuffling exercise at the UN.

It is, in other words, exactly the sort of ephemeral wisp of nothingness that will prompt the Trudeau government to fall all over itself in its eagerness to sign and then incessantly tweet about.

And that’s the real danger of agreements like this. It’s not that this will result in Canada’s identity being swept away by a tidal wave of foreigners, but that it will give the Liberals a fig leaf to obscure the very real policy failures on the immigration file that have occurred under their watch. It was just days ago that the federal auditor general reported that the recent surge in illegal migration into Canada has completely overwhelmed the government’s ability to process the incoming numbers, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Canadian taxpayer.

This issue has been a slow-motion train wreck for the Liberals, and it’s something they need to fix before it completely guts popular support for immigration, which has already begun to show signs of strain under this government.

But fixing actual problems is hard work. Why worry about that when you can just fly your ministerial entourage to another UN party and toast to a pointless agreement while loudly celebrating your government’s compassion on social media? Tweets make governing so much easier.