Refugee policy weakened by Tory changes
We must recommit to ‘naming’ and ‘additionality’ as bedrock principles
On Thursday, photos of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi shocked the world. The images showed the boy lying in the surf on a Turkish beach near where he and members of his family drowned while trying to escape the civil war in Syria. The pictures stirred the global conscience in a way countless human rights reports on the Syrian refugee crisis have not. The pictures thus recall what social scientists term the identifiable victim effect.
As summarized by economist Thomas Schelling, the death of a single person evokes “anxiety and sentiment, guilt and awe, responsibility and religion (but) ... most of this ... disappears when we deal with statistical death.”
The same thought is expressed by the famous saying, dubiously attributed to Josef Stalin, that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
There is a long history of our preference for individual victims compelling us to act on vast global problems, including the plight of refugees. In fact, Canada’s refugee policy was once an example of an international program that did just this.
A fitting legacy to Kurdi’s death would be to recognize the motivational power that tragedies such as his can have by again harnessing the response toward humanitarian ends.
In 1979, Canada set up the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program. It allowed nongovernment organizations — churches and synagogues, ethnic and cultural organizations etc. — to bring refugees to Canada as permanent residents. The greatness of the program was shown during its first two years when Canadians sponsored 35,000 refugees from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. In 1986, the United Nations recognized the “people of Canada” with the Nansen Medal, which honours extraordinary service to refugees — the only time the prize has gone to a whole country.
The success of the program was due to its central principles, one of which is “naming.” As the Canadian Council for Refugees explains, “sponsors can propose the individual refugees they wish to settle.
Naming means that Canadians can respond to the needs of individual refugees or particular refugee communities that concern them.” In this way the program tapped into our concern for identifiable victims as a means of addressing statistical misery. To date, more than 225,000 refugees’ lives have been changed by Canada’s unique policy.
In recent years however, the program has become much less effective. Applications were traditionally sent to a local Citizenship and Immigration Canada office. Since 2012, everything has been centralized at one understaffed Winnipeg branch. At the same time, the paperwork has become ridiculously burdensome, creating processing times of up to four years. Cuts to refugee health-care coverage have made sponsorship more expensive, a disincentive to get involved.
Since 2011 the government has undermined the naming principle by imposing its own preferences on which regions sponsored refugees can come from.
A second central pillar of the private sponsorship program was additionality. This is the idea that privately sponsored refugees will be over and above those taken in by government. Since 2011, this too has been compromised, with the government now imposing caps on how many refugees can be privately sponsored.
Groups involved in private resettlement are represented by the Canadian Refugee Sponsorship Agreement Holders Association. Shortly after Kurdi’s photos became public the association released a statement: “Canadians have been contacting Sponsorship Agreement Holders in record numbers asking how they can contribute to a sponsorship (for) Syrian refugees.”
This is a sign of the power the identifiable victim effect can have. That power would be far greater if Canada recommitted to naming and additionality as bedrock resettlement principles. Because there will be many more victims, and they too will have names.
More than 225,000 refugees’ lives have been changed by Canada’s unique policy.