Political fallout in Ottawa carries echoes of Syrian refugee crisis,
Syrian refugee crisis toppled Harper in 2015. Is Trudeau at risk now?
Watching the Afghan crisis unfold on TV, Tima Kurdi can’t help but relate to the desperation she sees — of people fleeing a brutal regime or risking their lives by clinging to a moving aircraft with the hope of reaching a safe place.
It was only a few years ago the Syrian woman from Coquitlam, B.C., was knocking on the doors of politicians and immigration officials begging for help to bring her family in Turkey here. Canada responded after the photograph of her three-yearold nephew, Alan Kurdi, lying face down on a beach shocked the world’s conscience.
“It brings back all my emotions when I see the Afghans,” Kurdi told the Star. “When people are in danger, they do anything and everything to be safe.”
Alan Kurdi drowned with his mother and older brother when their boat to Greece capsized near the Turkish coast, changing the course of a Canadian election and propelling a national project that changed the lives of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.
That was in 2015 and Canada was in the middle of an intense federal election as the Conservative government under thenprime minister Stephen Harper was hammered for its reluctance to open the door to Syrian refugees. It was the election that saw Harper’s government ousted by Justin Trudeau and the Liberals.
“What happened to my nephews was a sad tragedy, but it was a gift to the Trudeau government,” Kurdi says today.
Now, in the midst of another election, there’s a new humanitarian crisis, and the governing Trudeau Liberals are the ones being criticized for failing to adequately help the Afghan interpreters and civilians who worked for Canada on the ground in that country and are being targeted by a ruthless Taliban.
Since the election campaign officially kicked off, the Liberals have been dogged by media questions and criticism from advocates and the military veterans community about Ottawa’s slow response to the rapidly changing situation in Afghanistan. This week, photos and clips of desperate Afghans falling off a U.S. military flight in the air went viral.
On Friday, Trudeau was again forced to defend his government’s response to the crisis in Afghanistan, pointing to its record in resettling Syrians.
“Everyone did their part when it came time to welcome in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees back in 2015 and 2016,” he said. “When people are scrambling around the world, I can tell you that everyone is working incredibly hard, day and night, to try and get as many people out of Afghanistan into safety as possible, and we will continue to do everything we possibly can.”
On Thursday, a Royal Canadian Air Force flight flew 188 people, including 175 Afghans and 13 foreign nationals, out of Kabul, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said on Twitter.
“Canadian flights will continue for as long as the situation on the ground permits,” he added.
Observers say there is pressure for the Liberal party leader to handle the Afghan file well between now and election day on Sept. 20.
“These images are very powerful,” said University of Toronto political science professor Randy Besco. “The media very rarely actually changes people’s minds on an issue. But what they do is they make people think about it, as opposed to thinking about something else. So when you see a lot of media coverage, it has people thinking and talking about the issue.”
Traditionally, foreign policies, international crises and immigration issues have not been seen as big determinants of Canadian elections, with voters often more concerned about their day-to-day problems.
But some say the Syrian crisis did play a role in the outcome of the 2015 federal election, raising the question: Could the fall of Afghanistan come to weigh on the fate of Trudeau’s Liberals in a similar fashion?
Chris Alexander, former immigration minister under the Harper government, said the Syrian crisis was the “game changer” of the 2015 election.
Fully aware of how the European migration crisis dominated media headlines that summer, Alexander said he asked the Conservative party to bring more Syrian refugees to Canada, but the people running the campaign did not heed his advice.
Trudeau seized on the issue and pledged to bring in 25,000 Syrians within three months if the Liberals won the election.
“That set the tone for our campaign, the backdrop for our campaign, and made this issue much more important than it would have been if the wave of migrants was coming to Europe a year earlier or a year later. I think it was one of the two or three absolutely definitive issues,” Alexander told the Star.
“I wanted to do what Trudeau has done and more. I proposed … that we should bring 100,000 Syrians to Canada quite quickly and we still haven’t done that … Was that the issue in the election campaign? I’ll leave that to you to decide.”
It did not help when Alan Kurdi, the boy in the photo that captured global attention, actually had a Canadian connection through his aunt, who had been unsuccessfully trying to bring her brother’s family to Canada from Turkey. It brought a global crisis that much closer to home.
Alexander feels the government’s role in the current situation in Afghanistan is a bit different, because Canada is simply facing the same challenges as other governments in evacuating their allies from the country.
“We know who we want to help. But the Taliban won’t let them into the airport and it’s nothing Canada can do on its own to fix that problem,” he said, adding the Liberals’ plan to resettle 20,000 refugees who already fled Afghanistan “is the right thing to do.”
Toronto activist Raja Khouri, who founded Lifeline Syria in 2015 with other advocates, said the Syrian issue was only a final electoral straw in what many saw as anti-Muslim policies under Harper’s 10-year tenure.
The ban of the niqab — a veil covering most of a Muslim woman’s face — at a citizenship ceremony and the promise of setting up a “barbaric cultural practices” hotline targeting primarily the Muslim community painted the Conservatives as a party that’s anti-diversity and racist.
“You had a Conservative government that was very clear with its intention not to bring in any Syrian refugees, but it wasn’t this one stand-alone issue. It was strongly linked to an obviously Islamophobic government that we had at the time,” Khouri said.