CKNW Editorial
for January 13, 2000

With the boat people issue becoming more and more serious the national temperature is rising quickly. These people are seen as illegal by many, criminal by some, to the point where many Canadians would cheerfully waive the presumption of innocence for which our justice system is so famous and simply start sending people home. Others would intercept the ships and refuse them entry into Canadian waters. I suppose that one must infer from this that many of us would abandon Canada's acceptance of the United Nations commitment to helping refugees.

The one thing which seems to be universal is the condemnation of snakeheads who bring these people in. And, of course, most of us accept - I certainly do - that many refugee claimants must turn to questionable behaviour in order to pay off the snakeheads.

The United Nations definition of a refugee can easily be accessed on the internet does not include, economic refugees. Those who would turn away, without a hearing, the Chinese "boat people" assume that they are all "merely" economic refugees.

That's interesting in this sense - I would argue that if the poverty is institutionalized the line between an economic refugee and a UN refugee is somewhat blurred. But I digress.

Now, I hate to bring fair play into this but are we right in assuming that these people from China are not UN refugees but are economic ones?

Let's look at the precedents. Until a decade ago we automatically assumed that anyone from an Iron Curtain country was a real refugee. These were totalitarian countries that denied civil liberties and that was that. Even refugees who were privileged, such as hockey players like the Stastny brothers, were immediately accepted as real refugees.

The Iron Curtain is down and there are no more refugees from that area of the world. In the old days of the iron curtain we greatly admired those who risked death to gain their freedom. In fact, we accepted the fact that they had taken enormous personal and family risks as prima facie evidence that they must be genuine refugees. After all, anyone so desperate as to climb the wall or crawl over a heavily mined "no man's land" must truly be legitimate.

China is a communist country which, at the time the iron curtain was coming down along with the Berlin Wall, set tanks on students wanting a vestige of freedom. It is a country where dissidents are treated with great brutality.

It is also a country where women are forced to have abortions if they already have a child.

It is every bit as repressive as was, say, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Poland prior to 1989. And consider this - the migrants we're dealing with run every bit as much danger as Czech, Hungarian or Pole ever ran. These folks are leaving everything they have ever known and loved, including their nativeland to either get in a leaky boat or into a narrow container in order to seek refuge. Is it so wrong that some of us think that perhaps this indicates a desperation that goes beyond just the question of escaping poverty?

The problem here is at least in part race. Questions which very few raised when people escaped the iron curtain are raised with great gusto with Chinese. I believe this is because many people believe that there are too many Asians in Canada.

Well, this is where the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time comes in. Those are two separate questions unless we are prepared to say that people claiming refugee status from China are not entitled to have that issue heard before they are deported.

If it is our position as a nation that we have too many Asians and that, therefore we will have different rules for refugee claimants from Asia than elsewhere then let us at least have the courage to state that as our policy.

The United States has, it seems, declared that Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande are prima facie not Convention refugees and must be sent home. Let us as Canadians, if this is what we believe, state to the world that those who arrive from China are, prima facie, not UN refugees and also must be shipped home directly without any intervening hearing.

Either we accept that those who arrive on our shores from China are entitled to claim refugee status and thus have a hearing or we don't. Those who oppose hearings for Chinese and other Asians ought at least to have the courage to state that it is the nationality of the claimant that bothers them.

On the evidence of refugees in Canada from eastern Europe and the generosity we extended to them I must conclude that many Canadians have quite different standards when similar refugee claimants come from Asia.

There is, of course, another way. We could put the resources necessary into the assessment system so that all matters would be heard so expeditiously that the word would get out that before you get into that container or onto that plane you should know that you're case will be quickly heard and if it's found wanting, you'll be sent packing.

For reasons that escape me, that doesn't seem to be an option.