The truth: zero new spaces for refugees
The story behind last week’s haunting images does not begin with the body of a little boy on a beach in Turkey. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has been reporting for years that people are fleeing violence in rapidly increasing numbers.
It reported in June that last year 42,500 people fled their homes every day. Every. Day. Half were children. The response? Aid agencies are overwhelmed. Camps are overflowing. Dangerous boats are more crowded than ever.
Bodies are appearing stacked in abandoned trucks and washed up on beaches.
All of this began before #refugeecrisis was trending on Twitter.
Incredibly, many governments responded by erecting fences, shutting down transit routes, putting people in detention, and poisoning the response of their own citizens by claiming that these desperate families are “queue-jumpers” or “terrorists.”
Canada has been a part of this. Our government has recently introduced nine bills and two orders-in-council that collectively make it harder for refugees to get to Canada; to be in Canada; and to stay in Canada. It has succeeded in implementing its regressive refugee policy.
We are not a world leader on refugee protection according to any metric.
Now that Canadians are seeing the desperation and demanding action, our government is also not telling us the truth about what it has done.
For example, the government claims that we do well on the basis of “UNHCR resettlement” numbers, knowing that these statistics rely on a technical definition of resettlement and capture only a small slice of refugees. None of the one million Syrians seeking protection in Lebanon are counted as resettlements. Nor are the tens of thousands of people fleeing to Europe; or the 800,000 Germany has recently agreed to take.
Using the UNHCR’s legally narrow statistics to say that Canada is a world leader is both factually wrong and insulting to countries that rank below us on these particular lists but are in reality doing much more.
What the government is not saying is that there have been no increases in our commitment to refugee resettlement over the past five years: in 2011, we set a maximum target of 14,000 refugees. We admitted 12,946. In 2016, the maximum is still only 14,000.
Over this same five-year period, the number of people who need help has increased exponentially: from 43 million forcibly displaced persons and 15 million refugees in 2011 to 60 million displaced persons and 20 million refugees today.
An additional five million refugees and zero increase in Canada’s response.
Critically, Canada’s recent commit- ment to resettle 10,000 more Syrian refugees also creates zero new spaces (remember: our overall resettlement objectives haven’t changed over the past five years). So all we have done is say that a certain number of Canada’s existing resettlement spots will now be reserved for people from a particular country (bad news if you’re fleeing violence in Afghanistan or Somalia).
Faced with four million Syrian refugees and 20 million refugees globally, our government’s response has been to play tricks with statistics and claim credit for things it has not done, and has no intention of doing.
(Australia’s government recently tried the same thing. It was forced to change its position in response to public demands that its commitment to 12,000 Syrian resettlements actually be “extra” spots.) In Canada, the key number is zero. That is the number of new refugees Canada has committed to take in a week the world is watching and demanding action. We must do better. Last week’s images remind us why.