CKNW Editorial
for August 11, 1999

What with all the fuss over refugees and more, evidently, on the way it might be useful if we all took stock of where we are and where we’re likely to be going.

There is great pressure for changing rules and regulations. In my view the only real changes needed in refugee rules are two in number – we must do a better job overseas of evaluating claimants so that it is not always felt necessary to become a boat person and we must speed up procedures. That also seems to be the official view of the Reform Party, according to its official critic, Mr Benoit, who says that any further boatloads from China or anywhere else ought to be given hearings and determinations be made before any action is taken. Be warned, however, that does not seem to be the position of senior justice critic John Reynolds who would presumably brand them as criminals and probably already has done so, nor Ted White.

But the question of immigration is going to become more serious as more and more overpopulated countries start to do business with us.

Back some years now, both Australia and New Zealand, under one guise or another, had a whites only policy. They don’t have that policy any more and there are very substantial Chinese and to a lesser extend Japanese and Indian populations in both countries.

How did that happen?

Trade pressure, nothing more, nothing less.

Both Australia and New Zealand, especially the latter, suffered greatly when Britain joined the Common market and they had to establish new market niches. There was only one area to turn to – Asia. Asian countries saw no need to expand trade with countries that had racially based immigration policies and made that clear.

The problem, when you think about it, also has a philosophical aspect to it. The world is divided up into nations but that’s only a convention. It is nowhere written that Canada, for example, can be a massive area of tiny population while other nations burst at the seams. I recognize that the convention is of longstanding – though not nearly as long as one might suppose – but the breaking of that convention has been fairly common. In recent history countries with large populations have looked to other territories to send some of their people. Britain is one such country … so was Italy in 1936 … and so was Germany in 1939. Germany made no bones about it – they were after Liebensraum … room to live. Japan was such a country in 1931. Now it’s true that in some cases the adventuresome country didn’t move a lot of people but they pirated other people’s resources so that their large populations could live better which amounts to the same thing.

In fact a Japanese diplomat, in 1940, was asked why his country was expanding into China, Indo China and what was then the Dutch East Indies. Didn’t he know that colonialism was a bad thing? He replied that Britain, Japan, Holland and France had all played poker and once they had got all the chips, declared the game illegal and took up Contract Bridge. And there’s a great deal of truth in that – it all depends on the perspective of time and place.

As globalization increases and we rely more and more upon markets with huge populations what are we going to say when our trading partners, in making deals with us, put immigration on the table?

I frankly don’t know what we’ll do but it’s pretty clear that we don’t have any plans for such an eventuality which, as sure as God made little green apples, will come to pass. Maybe there is a plan somewhere that has not been vouchsafed unto the mere voters of the land.

But if history is any guide, the question of our access to markets with burgeoning populations will be conditional on our willingness to take some of their surplus population off their hands. And we should be prepared.