If there’s the will, massive airlift possible
Canada has risen to occasion in the past, but campaign makes action more difficult
The phrase “world community” was still a novelty in the early winter of 1956, when Joseph Robillard raced to Vienna on urgent humanitarian marching orders from Ottawa.
Robillard, Canada’s highest-ranking immigration official in Europe, had one job — tear down the red tape facing hordes of terrified Hungarian refugees as they poured across the Austrian border from battered Budapest. Process people in flight from the wall of Soviet steel bearing down on their homeland. Set them on a course for Canada, if they so desire. Do it quickly. Don’t sleep till you’re done.
In a 96-hour, around-the-clock whirlwind, Robillard delivered a bureaucratic miracle. By sunset on Nov. 29, the whistle sounded as a train emblazoned “Hungarians For Canada”— a train filled with young families, including excited “youngsters full of pep” — pulled out of Vienna’s West Station. In all, 460 souls were aboard, many bound ultimately for Toronto, after crossing the Atlantic free of charge on a ship chartered by Ottawa.
That, Canada, is how your greatgrandparents rolled. Robillard’s train was the first big wave in what would become a torrent of 37,000 Canada-bound Hungarians arriving by air and sea.
It didn’t happen fearlessly. In the drumbeat of media noise accompanying the decision to open the immigration floodgates, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson were warned of potential infiltrators among the rescued — “What if some of the people fleeing Communism are Communists?!”
But Canadian public consensus, as the Toronto Star noted in a 1956 editorial, settled around the ideal that “the cry of humanity must be answered before all else.” Somehow, fear of the “red menace” was overcome.
It also didn’t happen selflessly, as Toronto Star correspondent Douglas Blanchard observed dryly from the train station in Vienna, writing, “Canada will make a handsome profit on the deal because everybody on the train is a hand-picked asset, very young or very skilled.”
A weary Robillard acknowledged that, in his sleepless haste, he willfully favoured the best and the brightest, approving young families led by skilled tradespeople just a few language lessons away from thriving in Canada. The elderly and infirm were left behind.
“It has been really tragic sorting them out,” Robillard told The Star. “Many couples had to leave young children behind . . . the suffering has been indescribable. Many crossed the border only three or four days ago. It is a terrific upheaval in their lives to find themselves suddenly uprooted and bound for a different world. I hope people in Canada will give them the warmest of welcomes; they deserve it.”
What lessons, if any, are to be had in the archival entrails of Canada’s Hungarian triumph, 61 years later? At the very least, this: when the Office of the Prime Minister spells it out loud and clear, the bureaucrats can move like Olympians. In the spir- it of Joseph Robillard, years of refugee limbo can shrink to mere days.
But does can mean should, in the context of the long-neglected Syrian crisis, circa 2015? And if they answer is yes, the question becomes not just how many, but how?
Of all the numbers tossed around this week, the biggest surprise came from the lips of retired general Rick Hillier, who called for the rapid intake of 50,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end.
The outspoken Hillier offered a detailed Facebook post outlining a multi-partisan refugee rescue plan involving the Canadian military, the RCMP, the Department of Foreign Affairs and other departments.
“I know it sounds implausible, but we Canadians are capable of doing the implausible when we believe it important enough,” wrote Hillier.
Some military analysts, while applauding the momentum for a greater Canadian effort, warn against the dangers of making policy on the fly in the midst of an election campaign.
“If you tell the military to do an airlift, they will do an airlift. If you tell them to put up a tent city for incoming refugees, they will put up a tent city,” said Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
“But is it really fair to pluck some- one out of a camp in the desert in October or November and put them up in a tent in Canada all winter long? It may or may not be. My point is we should be thinking this through carefully in a way that co-ordinates with allies, the UN and other agencies on the ground to get the greatest impact and benefit from our increased effort,” he said.
“But it is especially difficult to achieve that kind of coherence in the middle of a campaign. We have a great opportunity here.”
“But instead of the federal government and party leaders talking arbitrary numbers, be it 10,000 or 50,000, we should be thinking from the bottom up, and ask the cities, ‘How many can you handle?’ ”
The contrast of Hungary in 1956 versus Hungary today, including shocking images this week of a Hungarian camerawoman kicking and tripping desperate refugees as they stormed across the border, also presents Canada with an opportunity to leverage any increased commitment to refugees.
“Maybe Canada can say to Hungary and Poland and the Czech Republic, where EU resistance to refugees is strongest, ‘We’ll share your obligation. You have to get used to the idea that you are part of the prosperous world, but we understand you are on a learning curve, so you take half and we’ll take half,’ Leuprecht said.
“It’s a way of using what Canada will do as an incentive for Europe.”
Walter Dorn, a peacekeeping specialist and professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College and the Canadian Forces College, shared Leuprecht’s caution, noting that Hillier’s call for a major military effort comes as the number of Canadian Forces peacekeeping personnel plunges to an all-time low of just 27 soldiers.
Canada now boasts a fleet of five massive C-17 Globemaster aircraft based at CFB Trenton with sufficient capacity to move a small city of refugees. But with a running cost of nearly $40,000 an hour, commercial air and sea transport options would likely be much cheaper, as indeed they were in 1956, when Canadian outsourced its refugee transport needs, Dorn said.
“Where Canadian Forces personnel could prove valuable is in providing a security component wherever the refugees might land,” Dorn added. “On paper, it is a great idea to bring in thousands, a truly generous act by Canada. And if the will is there to mobilize and resource the public service and customs and immigration department to take it on.
“I can see soldiers providing effective non-combatant security while the refugees undergo processing. Under the leadership of senior government officials, it can work.”