How Doug Ford conjured up a war over refugees
If Canada faces a cross-border crisis, Doug Ford knows why.
Migrants breaking the rules. Sneaking in as refugees under false pretenses. Gaming the system. Committing the cardinal Canadian sin of queuejumping.
Ground Zero for unauthorized crossings by asylumseekers is at the Quebec-U. S. border. But a bigger political flashpoint has opened up here, in neighbouring Ontario, where our premier has seized on the issue as a grave threat.
Ontario’s government is leading the charge with loaded language, railing against “illegal border crossers” and waging a war of words against Ottawa. The more restrained Quebec government, by contrast, prefers neutral phrases — “non point of entry border crossers” — that don’t conjure up Ford’s legal fiction of criminality by genuine refugees.
Ford believes the blame lies with one man, one tweet: All those asylum-seekers are answering the call of Justin Trudeau, who supposedly opened the door to our undefended border by boasting that Canada is a welcoming country.
Notwithstanding waves of migrants across the Mediterranean, a surge of asylum-seekers into America, and boat people streaming to Australia, no one would have walked into Canada until the prime minister invited them? My Tuesday column described an accidental encounter with a family of Colombian refugee claimants as I vacationed in Vermont. While jogging along a converted recreational trail — an old railway line that has become an underground railroad for people seeking sanctuary — I came upon the Colombians, who asked the way to Canada.
I pointed north to the frontier, for it wasn’t my place to judge their dash for sanctuary. Most readers said they’d have done the same in my shoes.
Would our premier have turned them in? Or delivered a lecture about respecting borders? As legal experts keep repeating, international and Canadian law recognize that genuine refugees are not judged or penalized for the way they seek sanctuary.
The answer might depend on whether the asylum-seekers actually merit protection, or are merely pretending to. But how could anyone know without first letting them plead their case under due process? That’s our legal obligation, regardless of whether they skirted official border posts.
Yes, there are legitimate concerns about the rising numbers of border-crossers. Shouldn’t refugee claimants remain in America to plead their cases in what is surely a safe sanctuary, rather than cherry-picking Canada? After all, that’s why Canada negotiated a bilateral agreement with the Obama administration to send back anyone who makes a refugee claim on our side of a border crossing.
It is hardly unreasonable for Canadians to want a secure frontier, even if we revel in our “undefended border.” But theory and reality are two different things.
If refugees are spooked by President Donald Trump’s hostility, and believe Canada is a better bet, how to stop them from coming? Should we erect a Trump-style electrified fence to bar their way? Conservative critics suggest Canada could unilaterally declare all of our 6,500-kilometre border an “official crossing” so as to invoke the old agreement (as if Trump would meekly acquiesce). But that would only encourage migrants to sneak across far more remote areas of our border, out of sight of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who routinely intercept migrants through more established pathways.
While the Mounties have improvised a solution to the surge in crossings — lying in wait at the most heavily trafficked pathways to process asylum claimants — it no longer makes sense. I watched two RCMP cruisers intercept the border-crossers I encountered in Vermont after being tipped off by the Americans, straining resources on both sides.
The obvious remedy is to suspend the bilateral border agreement, and stop automatically handing asylum claimants back to the Americans at official crossings. Not because Trump’s America is unjust — even if rough justice, it’s still robust by world standards — but because the old accord is now unenforceable and unaffordable.
As for Ford’s claim that a Trudeau tweet triggered a tsunami of border-crossers — “this mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government” — that’s news to the U.S. border guards I spoke to on the front lines of this fictional crisis.
They say border traffic surged in direct response to American media coverage of Trump’s anti-refugee rhetoric, not in reaction to harmless humblebragging by Trudeau on Twitter.
As for that quintessentially Canadian complaint about queue-jumping, it is a myth. Refugees and immigrants are in two completely separate processing streams. There has always been a mad scramble by asylum-seekers to “land” in safe havens around the world to stake an immediate claim. Just ask the Europeans.
Short of building a wall, there is no obvious way to dissuade people who are desperate and determined.
But it is all too easy to build walls by driving wedges between us, testing the limits of tolerance.
In a future column: practical versus political ways of responding to refugees.