The death of the Syrian Kurdi family on Wednesday — and the terrible image of three-year-old Alan washed up on a Turkish beach — has provoked international outrage at Canada’s apparent indifference toward refugees. The high cost of asylum applications, government disengagement from the asylum process and biases in the granting of asylum means that many refugees never reach Canada’s shores — and some die tragically as a result.
In an interview with a National Post reporter last week, the children’s aunt, Teema Kurdi, revealed that the family’s application to join her in Vancouver had been rejected by Canadian Immigration authorities, thus prompting the fatal sea journey. It later emerged that in fact the family never formally applied for asylum, because of the serious bureaucratic hurdles and the expense involved, as well as her own modest resources, which had already been diverted into an unsuccessful attempt to help another brother seek asylum in Canada.
Instead she had her local MP Fin Donnelly hand-deliver a letter seeking assistance to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, which went unanswered. It is not just the cost of asylum applications that are being scrutinised as a result of the Kurdis’ deaths, but also the state’s lack of involvement in the asylum process and their insistence on cumbersome bureaucratic procedure, even in war zones.
Private sponsorship programmes are currently the asylum-seeking mode of choice for Canada’s Conservative government, which refugee groups say has been disastrous for people fleeing conflict. On Wednesday, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander was repeatedly challenged by national CBC host Rosemary Barton on why the Conservatives were turning to the private sector to sponsor refugees rather than the more traditional government sponsorship route — a claim he continued to deny. He then went on to falsely claim that this was the programme’s first panel discussion on the topic. In an about face, the next day, he suspended his campaign to return to Ottawa and focus on investigations into the Kurdi case and even Prime Minister Stephen Harper included the tragedy in his campaign speeches — albeit as a pretext for more military engagement in the region.
According to the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, new laws introduced in 2012 cut off health care for asylum seekers, criminalised them and imposed “unrealistic time limits for refugee claimants to prove their claims” that “result in grave injustices” and undermine Canada’s human rights record.
According to the advocacy group No One is Illegal, as a result of new government restrictions, refugee claims decreased by 50 per cent and the number of accepted refugees dropped by 30 per cent between 2006 (when Stephen Harper was first elected) and 2012. A law introduced in 2014 denied social assistance to a majority of refugees and was condemned by Amnesty International and other human rights groups as being in violation of international law.
The Conservative government also introduced policies that discriminate in favour of ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East — favouring Christians over Muslims — which is also illegal under international charters, as well as draconian laws on immigration detention. Since 2000 there have been over a dozen documented deaths, including that of Lucia Vega Jimenez, a Mexican woman, whose story is Kafkaesque. Caught by Vancouver transit police without a bus ticket one day in 2013, she was taken to a detention facility and threatened with deportation. After weeks of incarceration and with her deportation looming, she took her own life rather than return to Mexico where she had repeatedly said she was afraid for her safety because of a violent ex-boyfriend.
Shameful moment
Another shameful moment in Canada’s history was the Komagata Maru incident. In 1914, a boatload of 376 subjects from the Punjab in then-British India were denied entry into the port of Vancouver and were kept languishing in difficult conditions for weeks. Eventually only 24 were allowed to disembark in what would become a precedent setting instance of anti-Asian exclusion laws. (When my own Syrian great-grandparents, Christians fleeing Ottoman era oppression, arrived in Canada in 1908, their travel documents were stamped “Asiatic.”) A century later, the creeping criminalisation of the people seeking to come to Canada continued when two shiploads (one in 2009 and another in 2010) of Tamils fleeing civil war in Sri Lanka were detained in Vancouver only to be incorrectly labelled “terrorists”.
Now, faced with the Syrian tragedy, my nation has to decide between two different visions of Canada — one racist and exclusionary, the other compassionate and open to the world.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Hadani Ditmars is a past editor at the New Internationalist and the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone: a Woman’s Journey Through Iraq and the Wallpaper City Guide to Vancouver.
