CKNW Editorial
for October 15, 2001

The need for Canada to have a refugee program that works will become more, not less evident, as the days pass. Let’s remind ourselves what the UN Declaration, to which Canada is a signatory, says:- "a refugee is a person who is outside his homeland owing to a well founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion." Now let’s consider who, under any sort of fair interpretation, that would include.

Certainly it would apply to the millions of Falun Gong adherents in China for example. Without doubt it would apply to hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Let’s stop there because it makes my point.

Canada is less available than other places to these refugees, of course, because of geography. But will that always be so?

Europe has become available by a sort of underground railway that moves people overland into places like Albania where speedboats take them to Italy. From there they are taken into other European countries and we now know of groups of them actually trying to walk to England by the Chunnel. As routes are closed to the Asian source of refugees, new ones will open. And as we know, for refugees who can raise a bit of money either beforehand or by later promises, Canada and the United States are quite easily attained. This availability will increase.

It seems to me, therefore, that before we do anything else in this country we ought to re-visit the definition of refugee and decide whether we should continue to abide by the UN Declaration. I say this because it is raw hypocrisy to subscribe publicly to a human declaration that we’re not prepared to abide by.

It would also seem to me that the European Union, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and other principal refuge countries ought all to examine what obligations they are prepared to honour. I also think that the haven countries ought to make a special effort to deal with the refugee groups that are now in camps. It’s not fair, for example, that Pakistan should have to take all the refugees from Afghanistan. But point one is simply that Canada should stop playing word games – either we are prepared to take UN defined refugees, or we make up our own definition.

Now let’s deal with what we do when refugees arrive on our doorstep. And let’s dissociate the refugee situation, in our minds, from immigration which is quite a different question. When we do that we can look at what process we will adopt. And when we get to this point we have a very big decision to make.

You see this is what infuriates me about the Canadian Alliance approach as articulated – if you could bring yourself to call it articulation – by Randy White on this show last Friday and Stockwell Day on the weekend. Day, White, John Reynolds and their ilk are very good indeed at pushing all the right hot buttons and getting attention – and they don’t hesitate to mingle the issue with immigration to hit as many hot buttons as possible. But they won’t face the difficult question. Neither will the Liberals, for that matter, because they recoil in horror at alienating a single vote in the ethnic constituencies that support them.

The very first point you reach in coming up with a refugee policy that works is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its application to refugees as mandated by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Singh case. From a practical point of view, if you won’t bring in a policy that, under the constitution excludes the operation of the Charter by use of the "Notwithstanding" clause, you will have a system with built-in delays. No matter how you streamline the system, once you have hearings that must be real hearings, you get lawyers, witnesses, other evidence and, inevitably appeals. This is not avoided by Stockwell Day’s idea of keeping some refugees – he can’t tell us which ones – in custody because as long as the Charter applies there will be a lawyer at the door with a writ in his hand.

Without any question you can streamline procedures and make it better but you will never ever get a process that expeditiously deals with refugee claimants as long as you must dispense justice that will pass muster of a court challenge under the Charter. That fact must simply be faced.

The Alliance simply will not understand that a refugee claimant is not a criminal and he is not an unwelcome person until after there has been due process and a determination of those questions. Please underscore the word after. And it matters not how the claimant reached our shores – his status must be determined by due process which includes all the rights of the Charter.

The Alliance, and others who want change, having reached this point must make a decision. Life is full of decisions and Messrs Day, White and Reynolds ought to try making one. Either you do everything you can to streamline the process – more money, more people, better procedures - and by so doing concede that all you can do is make things marginally better … or you bite the bullet, face the voting public and candidly state that we should have new refugee laws and procedures that are not bound by the Charter and the presumption that a claimant is legitimate until the contrary is proved. Having crossed that Rubicon – a Rubicon Randy White was clearly not prepared to cross last Friday and Day wouldn’t cross on the weekend – you then put in place what procedures you think are correct.

I accuse the Canadian Alliance of wanting it both ways. For all the good in the party and its members, they have a mean and dare I say it racist streak. If they don’t take pleasure in appealing to baser instincts by pushing hot buttons they certainly don’t hesitate to do so. They know that the immigration policies of Ottawa over the past 30 years have been hard for many Canadians to tolerate. And they know that if properly provoked, many Canadians will associate the word refugee with whatever it is they don’t like about immigration policy even though they are very separate issues. This is not, repeat not, to say that citizens who have concerns either about immigration policies or refugee policy are racists. Not at all. It is to say that Canadian Alliance spokesmen know that there is a racism button to push and they push it.

If the Canadian Alliance ever hopes to be a government in waiting they have to start acting like one. They could begin by forgetting the rhetoric and the incessant trotting out of anecdotes as their spokesmen are wont to do … by facing the problem of defining what a refugee is … by facing the issue as to whether or not they are prepared to move "notwithstanding" the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and then give us chapter and verse what their policy is.

The Liberal government policy is clearly business as usual except we’re going to spend some money making it look like things are being done differently.

It’s not enough for the Canadian Alliance to simply bluster at the usual Liberal approach to problems … they must grasp the nettle and bring themselves to spell out a clear and workable alternative.