A few things we forgot in 2011

Having already dispensed with the first of my work related New Year’s resolutions (Write blog posts punctually every week), I have been trolling the Globe and Mail for the year in review in refugee stories. Trolling, I must add, without success. 2011 was the year the Canadian Parliament passed Bill C-4, the glibly titled “Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act”. The uproar caused by this re-jigging and re-issue of a previously defeated Bill-49 was formidable. Refugee advocacy groups dubbed bill C-4 the “Anti-refugee Bill”, claiming that the measures put in place under this bill would hurt, not protect, those at the very center of Canada’s refugee protection system.

            Among the concerns of refugee watchdog groups was the creation of a designated group of foreign nationals for whom refugee protection in Canada is offered with certain caveats intact. If designated (which sounds great until you read the fine print), you can be summarily detained for a year without regard to your individual situation, you may be denied reunification with your family, and you may be prohibited from traveling abroad for over 5 years. You may be only five years old, and these conditions still apply. There is rather a lot of poetic license written into Bill C-4, as the crux of the act rests on the Minister’s determination of who is a “designated foreign national”. Mode of arrival is the only guideline given to the Minister in order to determine who is a designated foreign national. (Hint: you on a plane with plenty of id documents = good, you and a hundred compatriots in a boat = bad).

            So far, little mention of the human smugglers. They must be featured in Chapter 2…

It was in the balmy summer months of 2011 when Bill C-4 passed, despite admirable debate and many fruitful conversations about Canada’s obligation to would-be refugees worldwide. Now with 2012 in its infancy, we must hope that the spirit of our refugee protection system has not gone quietly into that good night. Many and poignant were the voices that, while the debate over C-4 raged, hearkened back to the days when the Refugee Convention was forged. A world ravaged by WWII collectively acknowledged its culpability in refusing those Jews fleeing Germany who had landed on distant, including Canadian, shores. An agreement was created in 1951 to prevent the prejudices of today from causing the regrets of tomorrow. It is the spirit of this first legislation, if not the precise wording of its laws, which inspires the Canadian refugee protection system today.

History does not repeat itself and we rarely learn from our past mistakes. The men, women, and children who arrived in Vancouver in 2010-2011 are not those who arrived in 1939. The world is a different place and our obligation to protect more articulated. So lest we assume that those arriving en masse by boat are by default queue jumpers, dubious, terrorists, or by default anything at all, let us remember that those first would be refugees arrived by boat. May the prejudices of 2011 not turn into the regrets of 2012.