Canada must face refugee absurdity
Devote resources to properly handle problem
History may record 2019 as the beginning of the end of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) — the ever-more-risible document that says refugees must claim asylum in the first of the two countries they arrive in … unless they fly here or sneak across the border.
Even to describe how it works in practice is to impugn it. And as a matter of principle, it has never made any sense to discriminate between would-be asylum seekers by method of arrival except as a kludge, which is exactly what the STCA has always been: After the 9/11 attacks, amidst fears of a huge immigration clampdown in the U.S., hundreds of people started queuing at Canadian border crossings. Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government didn’t want to deal with them; Washington did him a favour; the queues disappeared; and most people forgot about the whole issue until word started to spread about Roxham Road and people from all over the world crossed in their thousands. Many of them will become Canadian citizens.
This week the Federal Court begins hearing a constitutional challenge to the STCA in which several witnesses will put a human face to the absurdity. One is a Burundian woman recently interviewed by the Toronto Star: Unaware of the STCA, she was turned back at the border and allegedly held for 51 days in an upstate New York jail, including 10 days in solitary confinement.
Once released, fearing her asylum claim would be rejected, she discovered Roxham Road and crossed into
Canada along with so many others. But unlike most of the crossers, thanks to a Liberal policy implemented earlier this year, she cannot claim asylum or work because Canada had already denied her admission — that is, when Canada refused to consider her asylum when she inquired at a proper border crossing.
In theory that policy actually bars her from even entering the country. But in practice nobody is barred from entering Canada who can get herself to Plattsburgh, N.Y., and afford cab fare to the border. And we can’t deport her, because we don’t deport people to Burundi. It’s a perfect mess that makes perfect sense as part of a case against the STCA.
We don’t deport people to Burundi because it’s one of the poorest and least developed nations in the world. Its human rights record is atrocious. This is why Canada accepts many Burundians’ asylum claims (nearly 1,600 between 2015 and 2018, and 552 in the first six months of 2019) and rejects very few ( just 105 from 2015 to halfway through this year). And it has always been absurd to ask someone from somewhere like Burundi to try her chances in the United States just because that’s where she got to first. The chances of success are incomparable: Between 2015 and 2018 more than five times as many Burundians gained asylum in Canada than in the United States — that’s real numbers, not per capita. We are essentially asking people who have risked everything in search of a better life, often at unimaginable peril and subject to horrendous exploitation, to throw up their hands at a “please do not enter” sign.
As a practical matter, that’s crazy. As a humanitarian matter, it makes a mockery both of the Liberals’ high-minded self-congratulation and international pontification and of the Conservatives’ insistence that asylum seekers “follow the rules.” That’s exactly what the Burundian woman did, and look at what it got her.
All this was true before Donald Trump took over the White House and turned the idea of the United States as a “safe” country for refugee claimants into something only government lawyers could argue — and will argue at the Federal Court — with a straight face. Trump doesn’t want the United States to be a safe country for refugee claimants. He has been very clear about this on more than enough occasions that we shouldn’t need to ask again.
The treatment of migrants at the southern border is a scandal that will taint the United States for decades. Trudeau shouldn’t need a court to tell him the situation at the northern border is, as a consequence, untenable. He can keep talking about Canada as a beacon of hope unto the world’s most downtrodden and a shining example to nations, or he can get serious about the moral obligations to refugees he claims to respect — and pontificate to people like Ontario Premier Doug Ford — and devote the necessary resources to handling this problem properly.
He can’t stop people from crossing the border anyway, and nor could any other prime minister. Canada might as well finally accept the situation for what it is, put on the big-boy pants and deal coherently and compassionately with the cards it has been dealt.
HE CAN GET SERIOUS ABOUT THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS TO REFUGEES HE CLAIMS TO RESPECT.