City considers sanctuary to counter Trump ban

Ottawa city councillors are working on plans to declare the capital a “sanctuary city” for migrants caught up in President Donald Trump’s executive order banning people from certain countries from entering the United States.

“It is not enough for this city council to tweet out ‘thoughts and prayers,’ ” said Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper.

Just exactly what kind of sanctuary Ottawa might offer — well, that’s not clear. There’s no formal definition of a sanctuary city, no United Nations form with boxes to tick. It means what the city making the declaration wants it to mean.

Hundreds of U.S. municipalities have voted to call themselves sanctuary cities, going back decades, and usually it indicates that their employees won’t ask whether residents are in the United States legally when they use city services. Sometimes it’s more extreme. San Francisco, for instance, outright forbids police to co-operate with federal immigration authorities to enforce deportation orders most of the time. That’s a big deal in places close to the Mexican border — not just welcoming newcomers arriving legally, but explicitly protecting illegal immigrants from being deported.

An equally big deal: Trump has threatened to cut off federal funding to cities that do that and has started by ordering federal departments to withhold lawenforcement grants.

Here in Canada, Toronto and Hamilton’s councils voted to call themselves sanctuary cities in 2014 long before Trump was even a candidate for president, a vote Toronto council reaffirmed Tuesday. On Monday, London city council voted to do something similar, once it gets a staff report on what it should mean on the ground. For them, the declaration has been mostly symbolic. You can’t be asked for your citizenship papers when you buy a bus pass or sign your kid up for a swimming class, but you weren’t before.

Ontario police don’t take direction from their city councils in the way American cops do, so municipal politicians couldn’t keep them from co-operating with immigration authorities even if they wanted to. But they can, and have in Toronto, made it policy not to ask about people’s immigration status unless there’s a specific reason to, so people don’t have to worry they’ll be deported if they call 911.

Sanctuary isn’t just a local effort. At Queen’s Park, New Democratic Party Leader Andrea Horwath fired an open letter to Premier Kathleen Wynne on Tuesday afternoon demanding that Wynne declare all of Ontario a “sanctuary province.”

“In recent years, cities like Toronto and Hamilton have shown tremendous leadership by making local services accessible to all residents, regardless of their immigration status,” Horwath wrote. “Now, our province must do the same. We must guarantee that services will always be accessible to everyone in Ontario.”

Opening provincial health coverage not just to temporary residents and people torpedoed by work-visa quirks, but people here illegally? Some of the people who pushed the sanctuary idea in Hamilton really hoped it would lay the groundwork for OHIP for everyone. A group called OHIP For All estimates 500,000 people live in Ontario who don’t have Ontario health coverage, for all kinds of reasons. Big-hearted as it would be to all but eliminate health cards, it’s also a huge thing, on a completely different scale from anything a municipality could do.

Ontario is already plenty welcoming and will stay that way, Wynne replied in her own open letter Wednesday.

“I look forward to working with my municipal, provincial, territorial and federal colleagues and with everyone in Ontario to protect the inclusive society we have built together,” she wrote, vaguely.

Because Leiper and others on Ottawa council’s liberal wing — like Somerset’s Catherine McKenney and Rideau-Vanier’s Mathieu Fleury — want to put up a motion that stands a chance of passing a relatively conservative council, they’ll probably leave out rhetorical attacks on the Trump administration. They’ll focus on opportunities created by clumsy American policy that’s shut out immigrants with American jobs and American lives who were on their way to becoming American citizens, just because those people are from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan or Yemen.

“We’ve all seen the stories where people suddenly had a door closed,” Leiper said. “Academics who can’t go back to teach and research. Tech workers who can’t go back to work. Students who can’t go back to school. Well, can we open a different door for them?”

It could mean institutionalizing temporary programs and groups formed to welcome refugees from Syria and Iraq last year. It could mean setting up procedures for handling some new ban the Trump administration might impose in the future, so if travellers happen to be stranded in Ottawa the city government will know what to do.

“This is just making sure that the process that we need, we have in place so that people who are fleeing from persecution and war have a place to come,” Leiper said.

With the next council meeting not due for a week, Leiper and the others have a bit of time to think it through.

“Usually, there’d be a little more work in the hallways before we talked about it (in public),” he said. “But things are moving really fast these days.”