WHAT REALLY MATTERS IS WHAT WE DO NEXT
Our national leaders have to step up when it comes to the refugee crisis
It shouldn’t take a single photograph of a small boy lying dead on a beach to move us to act on the crisis in Syria, but it does and we may as well be honest about it.
There were millions of refugees on the move inside Syria and out, long before little Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish shore to be photographed. Thousands had already died, either in the civil war itself or in the desperate flight to escape it, many in similar circumstances, many of them children. There was nothing uniquely appalling about his death that made it stand out from the rest. It was just more visible.
So yes, we’re all a bit late welling up with tears over a crisis we had been largely ignoring until now — all but a handful, such as the great campaigning journalist Terry Glavin, who has been beating an angry, mournful gong over the Syrian slaughter more or less since it started.
And yes, much of the response has been unattractive: not only the sentimentalism that elevates an adorable child’s death over the nameless thousands that preceded it; or the hypocrisy of my own industry, piously insisting on how “important” it was to publish the photo when we all know what motives were at work; or the preening vanity of the social media set, posting their moral selfies announcing how personally “gutted” or “shattered” they were by it (see how caring I am!); but, surely worst of all, the instant rush to milk it for every ounce of partisan advantage.
If it was forgivable to let a single child’s death stand for the rest, it was frankly bizarre to see a crisis now convulsing three continents collapsed into the comparatively trivial question of whether the child’s death could be pinned on the Canadian government, or indeed on a minister within that government, for having rejected his refugee application. The case for the prosecution was always a little shaky — among other obstacles: Turkey’s apparent refusal to grant his family an exit visa (if the Turks wouldn’t let them out, how could we have let them in?) — even before it emerged that, in fact, there had never been an application to reject.
But never mind: there’s an election on, and points to score. And after the opposition and their online acolytes had finished playing politics with the issue, Conservative supporters rushed in to play politics all over again, this time over the playing of politics. How could you have used that poor little child for partisan purposes, they demanded to know, for all the world as if they were not putting the same dead child to the same use.
The point is: none of that matters now. It doesn’t matter who is being the biggest hypocrite, or what all of us should have done before. What matters is what we do next. It took a photogenic child’s death to get us to act? Fine. What matters now is that we act.
It might not be only sentimentality that explains the photo’s impact. It might be that such an event acts rather as a kind of starter’s pistol, a way of shocking millions of people, previously disconnected and disengaged, into simultaneous action. Our inertia until now may not have been entirely due to apathy or callousness. It may be, rather, out of a feeling of what one might call rational helplessness.
The crisis might have seemed too big, too intractable, for each of us to invest much care or attention. What good, after all, could any one of us do, on his own? But now we are all paying attention, we are all engaged — and not only that but each of us is aware that all the others are. And it suddenly dawns on us that if we seize this moment, if we all act together, we really can do some good. If every country, not just those directly affected, accepts its share of refugees, we can rescue a substantial number of the dispossessed — not all, or even most, but a sizable portion. And if every Canadian enlists in the effort, we can acquit ourselves honourably as a nation in this shared international endeavour.
But if that collective surge of goodwill is to be of much effect, if it is not to subside as quickly as it arose, it needs to be channelled in some way. In a word, it requires leadership.
Alas, leadership just now seems in short supply, at least at the national level. None of the partly leaders seems willing to stick his neck out much in front of the others. The Conservative Leader, Stephen Harper, can be fairly criticized for having been too slow to act as the crisis unfolded: though his government committed to accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years, and though he has promised in the course of the campaign to take in another 10,000 refugees, Syrian and Iraqi combined, barely 2,000 have been admitted to date.
The Liberals’ Justin Trudeau, it is true, has pledged to take in a further 25,000, which gets us closer to the sorts of numbers we admitted, say, after the fall of Vietnam. But that would still leave us taking in no more than one per 1,000 population — a tiny fraction of what countries like Germany and Sweden are doing. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, meanwhile, has committed only to take in 10,000 this year — no more than the Tories, if a little faster.
Into the void have stepped the country’s mayors. Toronto Mayor John Tory, in particular, has been attempting to organize some sort of coordinated municipal campaign, nationwide. The emphasis, it would appear, would be on encouraging private sponsorship. “I believe we should mobilize to sponsor Syrian refugees. This is who we are as Canadians,” he said Friday. “This will not happen by itself. It will happen when Torontonians step up.” Indeed, the mayor had reportedly already personally sponsored a refugee family, even before the events of recent days.
The thought occurs: what if our national leaders were to put themselves on the line in the same way? What if they were all to get behind the same campaign? What if they were to put politics aside, even for one day, and appear together on the same stage, exhorting the whole country to “step up?” What might we do then?
We’re all a bit late welling up with tears over a crisis we had been largely ignoring until now.