CKNW Editorial
for September 3, 2001

This is the 62^nd anniversary of the day France and Britain declared war on Germany. Canada, exercising her powers of nationhood for the first time in a formal, international sense, declared war seven days later. Italy was to join in on June 10^th, 1940, the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and the United States, finally, on December 8, 1941 after the previous day’s attack by Japan on Pearl Harbour. In one of his colossal blunders Hitler declared war on the United States a few days later and the issue was joined.

Of course World War II started for the Poles on September 1, 1939, for the Czechs and Austrians in 1938 and for China in 1931. In fact, the Second World War was really just the re-commencement of the First World War. The point of all this is to remind ourselves, and new generations who were not around to know, that this war was fought for a number of reasons, one of which was to make the world a better place for human beings.

Aside from the Holocaust, the slaughter of civilians and the dropping of two Atom Bombs the big hangover from World War II was the enormous displacement of peoples, many of whom were recent enemies pushed out of their former lands to make room for a newly constructed Poland and Czechoslovakia. Refugees took on a new meaning and the fledging United Nations got into the act with its agency for refugees, UNRRA, and all the members agreed that refugees were a world, not just a local problem. The United Nations Declaration on Refugees was signed by all western countries including Canada. Indeed Canada took in a great many DPs, as displaced persons were inelegantly called in those days, and again, in 1956, took in thousands of Hungarians fleeing that country because of the revolution and its aftermath.

In the years following the war the western nations lost their appetite for taking in refugees, in large measure because of two things – enormous numbers of people claiming to be refugees who were as much fleeing poverty – not an accepted head – than oppression ... and hitherto mostly white countries took in all sorts of non white immigrants which rather upset the existing white establishments. Sorting out who was a refugee and who wasn’t became a costly problem and one so apparently incapable of solution that millions of Americans of Mexican heritage, for example, are only in the United States, and now citizens thereof, by reason of amnesties granted by a government frustrated with its inability to deal with the so-called wetbacks. Canada has had similar problems, especially with people coming here, often with illegal and legal professional help, from China and elsewhere.

But, with all the problems we’ve had trying to sort out UN Declaration refugees from economic or so-called bogus refugees; with all the appalling government screw-ups and bureaucratic bungling; with all the rules and regulations we’ve tried to develop and enforce about immigration; with all the public unhappiness with the whole mess; we have a problem. A very big problem. For if there is one person who must be accepted, on the face of it, as a refugee it’s someone fleeing Afghanistan. Surely no one can argue that. But Australia is arguing it with 440 desperate boat people from Afghanistan. So is France. So is Britain. Imagine 44 people walking into the Chunnel trying to get to Britain from France – certain suicide. That’s how desperate this group of absolutely, 24 carat, genuine refugees from a truly oppressive regime are.

What are we in the free world going to do about it? That’s the question. What is the United Nations going to do about it? What are Canadians going to do? Are we to turn ourbacks on people who flee the Taliban as we did the Jews before the Second World War? Or from Saddam Hussein? Or any number of menaces in the Balkans? Are we to simply say well, because we have a lot of trouble sorting our the pepper from the fly droppings within our cozy bureaucratic immigration messes, you real refugees, whose status no one could possibly deny, are just out of luck? That the wars we fought for the ideals we stated are too far removed from our collective memories to count for much any more? Besides, all the room we might have had for you real refugees we’ve allotted to people who may or may not be refugees but we just haven’t had the will or skill to make a proper determination for them … so tough luck to you women trying to escape forced circumcision or being stoned in the marketplace for adultery … too bad for you men who let slip a bad word about your leader or tried to make things better in your land … too bad for all of you whose governments refuse to even accept international food and medical aid for you … because we are just not going to do anything.

Not a terribly pretty picture for all those who, within the living memory and living sacrifice of so many Canadians … who allied themselves in the name of making the world safe for democracy … who, in the name of Churchill and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms offered their lives … who, in the name of the brotherhood of man … and on it goes … all that stuff that somehow doesn’t seem to mean as much now as it did once when our Dads and Moms, our brothers and sisters, our uncles and aunts were putting it all on the line for freedom and a better world.

He was of another time and it was in a different context but as the man said, Lord God of Hosts be with us yet … Lest we forget … lest we forget.