In Canada, Harper's Conservatives Seem to Have Forgotten a
Cherished Tradition about Refugees
Harper’s been talking oddly of ‘old-stock Canadians’ – effectively
excluding hundreds of thousands
By Robert Fisk
September 23, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Independent"-
Europe’s refugee epic reached as far as the frozen heights of the
Rockies yesterday, in a gentle, very Canadian way. At an
international economics conference in the grand old town of Banff –
snow already dusting the slopes of Mount Rundle far above us – Dr
Tom Thompson of Olds College, the largest agricultural school in
Alberta, came up to ask me how he might bring Syrian refugees to his
university.
“It is our Canadian tradition, to help refugee families,” he told
me. “I’d love to help.” I put him in touch by phone with
international agricultural advisers in the Arab world, including
Beirut.
He meant what he said. Just as, on the other side of the mountains
on squeaky-clean Vancouver Island, the leader of Canada’s Green
Party – two MPs in Ottawa, perhaps another 10 after the 19 October
national elections – wants to help the Arab refugees streaming up
the landmass of Europe. Elizabeth May was herself once a refugee
lawyer (she used to help ship-jumpers in Halifax port) and wants
Canada to shine in its response to something her country has always
cherished: helping the world’s poor and oppressed. Canada took in
the huddled masses of Vietnamese boat people – 55,000 of them – in
the 1970s. So why not the Syrians, and Iraqis, and Afghans, today?
But here, alas, we must report a sordid and bigoted tale deep within
a country famous for its multiculturalism. Stephen Harper’s weird
Conservative government – its security laws fear-mongering their way
through a population normally famous for its generosity – is even
more reluctant than our own beloved David Cameron’s Cabinet to take
in the families fighting their way from the death-pits of the Middle
East.
Harper’s been talking oddly of “old-stock Canadians” – effectively
excluding hundreds of thousands of Canada’s new Muslim population
from the country’s modern history, and virtually second-tiering
their citizenship. His immigration minister, Chris Alexander –
desperately trying to claw back any shred of the Canadian
Conservative Party’s principals – has been talking these past few
hours of taking in more than an earlier figure of 20,000. This was
also an attempt to clean up his own reputation after scolding a
television journalist and the media in general for not paying
attention to the crisis – when he had himself been refusing all
interviews on the subject.
Canada has made plenty of offers of help to Christian, Yazidi and
other minority groups fleeing Isis territory over the past year, but
precious few for the latest and far more formidable exodus, on
grounds that are perfectly clear to millions of Canadians: they are
Sunni Muslims.
Right-wing newspapers and ministers have tried – without any
evidence – to suggest that Isis has hidden its agents among the
refugees, thus presenting the suffering of these people not as a
humanitarian concern but as security problem. These snide attempts
to smear hundreds of thousands of people as terrorists have reached
proportions which would be comical if they were not so immoral.
Harper’s Defence Minister, Jason Kenney, has blathered on about
meeting refugees in Middle East camps whose relatives were fighting
a “jihad” against the Syrian regime – something the West has been
encouraging Syrians to do for three years – and thus security must
“take precedence” over receiving those fleeing the battlefields. His
grotesque sympathy for the refugees makes cringing reading, for he
damns them even as he claims to agree with their innocence. “I do
not mean to suggest for a moment that all or most of the people in
the camps are connected to terrorist organisations or contribute a
security risk but it is plainly evident that some do. It would be
imprudent in the extreme to pretend otherwise.” Not for a moment,
indeed… And note the “all or most” bit: if all or most of the
refugees are not “terrorists” then presumably an awful lot are:
that’s the wretched man’s message!
As the Toronto Star columnist Haroun Siddiqui commented, Harper’s
government is “pandering to the dangerous stereotype that all
Muslims are potential terrorists”. And not only the government. In a
particularly frightening article in the right-wing National Post,
Father Raymond J De Souza, a Canadian university chaplain as well as
a parish priest, says that refugee camps are home to “Sunni Muslims,
not a few of which look kindly towards Isil [Isis]” and that “it
would be foolish to bring to Canada extremist elements that may be
useful in making trouble for Assad but would also be troublesome in
Canada”. Individual church groups are trying to help, but somehow
the good father’s message seems a little different from what Christ
would have said.
Sure, a new opinion poll suggests that 38 per cent of Canadians
still believe Harper’s lads and lassies would “make the best
decision for Canada on the Syrian refugee situation”, but at least
Canada’s ex-military men – usually the most flatulent of crusty old
generals – have had the guts to walk a little taller than the
politicians. The country’s former military commander Rick Hillier is
suggesting that Canada’s armed forces themselves could bring in
50,000 Syrian refugees by Christmas. Roméo Dallaire, the UN’s
commander in the Rwanda bloodbath, a fine man deeply troubled by
what he was forced to witness in Africa, has talked of bringing up
to 90,000 Syrian refugees to Canada who would be an “asset” to the
country. Security is a smokescreen, he says. “I think Canada and its
decision so far in regards to refugees is nothing less than
atrocious and totally foreign to what and who we are.”
Back in the 1970s, Canadian politicians sowed the same “security”
rubbish about the Vietnamese boat people – they might be “communist”
was the tag-line then, though not one turned out to be. But the
Harper gang probably haven’t read that far back in their country’s
history. Be sure that Dr Thompson has.
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