CKNW Editorial
for July 27, 1999

Do we believe in the rule of law or don’t we in this country? From what I’ve been reading and hearing lately, evidently we do not.

123 Chinese people show up on our coast in an old rust-bucket and after the usual formalities, claim refugee status. Almost without exception we hear the hue and cry that these illegal refugees ought to be sent home – some say in the old tub in which we arrived. Is it, then, the accepted norm in this country that if the newspapers call people bogus refugees that they therefore are just that? No hearing. Nothing. You arrived in this country other than through the normal channels therefore you are a bogus refugee.

This is evidently proved by the suspicion that the so-called bogus refugees paid money to bad people to get here … that they may even have indentured themselves to pay the huge some required by the crooks who brought them here.

So the Canadian rule is that if you arrive on our shores without clearing customs and immigration claiming that you are in fear of life and limb, you must be sent home forthwith.

Let me ask the awkward question I asked last week. If this was a boatload of white refugees, especially English ones, from a country in the Caribbean gone mad, would we send them back whence they came? Would there be the same outcry as we hear against these 123 wretched souls?

I think I’ve got a pretty good sniffer for hypocrisy and I sniff an overdose of that here.

The reason we’re so confounded concerned is that Canada is simply the gateway to the United States … that we have an obligation to keep these people out so the United States will be nice to us.

Well, folks, the last time I looked, China was a totalitarian communist state where human rights people work triple time just keeping abreast of the abuses heaped upon Chinese dissidents. And, again, the last time I looked, Cuba was a totalitarian communist state where human rights people work overtime just keeping abreast of the abuses heaped upon Cuban dissidents. Yet refugees from Cuba, however they arrive, are welcomed to the United States with open arms. And does anyone suppose that if the Cuban baseball team now playing in Winnipeg were to defect to Canada that there would be any problem having them declared as refugees? And sent, first class all the way, to their new homes in the United States?

In case you’re not with me, let me take you back a dozen years or so when Czechoslovakia was a communist state and, in fact, the most lenient one. So lenient that good hockey players made huge, by their standards, money and lived pretty high off the hog. You may remember the Stastny brothers. Well, it just so happened that about this time a Polish sailor (Poland was a repressive communist state at that time) jumped ship in Vancouver. Almost simultaneously one of the Stastnys, Peter if I recall correctly, got in his Porsche in Prague, motored leisurely into Austria and presented himself as a refugee to Canada. Now why Canada? Why not Austria …or Lichtenstein … or Malaysia? Well, he had a guaranteed fortune awaiting him with the Quebec Nordiques. There was no hassle for poor Peter. First class travel to Montreal, first class hotel room, landed immigrant status right now and Bob’s your uncle. The Polish seaman, of course, was deported.

Either Canada takes refugees or it does not. As a signatory to the United nations Charter it must, provided the alleged refugee is a legitimate one.

How then does a legitimate refugee get such a designation?

First of all, he has to find his way to Canada or a Canadian Embassy. And how the hell is the ordinary guy and gal going to do that, pray tell, if they don’t present themselves to authorities inside Canada?

What many Canadians seem to be saying is that we love legitimate refugees but since none of them are ever going to be able to present themselves to Canadian authorities, unless they are very rich or at least very privileged, the question doesn't arise because they can’t get here in the first place.

I do not for one second believe that people ought to be able to enter this country illegally. If they do and they do not fit within the UN definition of refugee then they should be deported. It is clearly wrong that those who wait to emigrate must go through all the hoops while others come in the back door. But refugees and immigrants are two different things. So before declaring someone to be a bogus refugee, ought we not, at the very least, determine whether or not he is that? Are we going to decide against a refugee claimant because he came in a boat and newspapers and callers to open line shows don’t believe he’s genuine? Is that the Canadian definition of the rule of law?

Quite apart from all this and I suppose irrelevantly I observe that those who are prepared to take enormous personal risks to get into Canada may just be better citizen than many with lots of money who come in legally, then return whence they came using their new found Canadian status as a fall back … but I digress.

If any or all of these 123 applicants for refugee status cannot satisfy the authorities that they fall within the UN definition, we are entitled to deport them. But surely, in this country of all countries we hear their case first. And surely it’s not open to us to offer as a defence that our procedures are so lousy and full of holes that it takes forever to make a determination. It is especially not open to us to make that defence if the question doesn’t even arise if the person claiming refuge can play hockey or baseball or happens to be escaping from Latin American communism not Chinese communism. Or has money.

My sniffer tells me that there’s some hypocrisy and not a little ill disguised racism in the air these days.