Brad Wall isn't building a wall — he's just writing bad things on it

“Let's not be mistaken, the people who are seeking refuge are not the barbarians. They are fleeing the barbarians.” — Nicolas Chapuis, French ambassador to Canada

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall wants prime minister Justin Trudeau to suspend his plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees into Canada by the end of the year. He fears that such an accelerated program would allow a few Islamic State barbarians to slip through the screening process.

How you can do more than what the United Nations has already done to pre-screen for families (as opposed to single young men), already separated from the unscreened refugees flooding Europe's borders, is hard to say. Suffice that any process would fall short of 100-per-cent security.

But in setting that as some kind of standard, Wall is building a wall of fear and suspicion around all Muslims — which is exactly what experts tell us the barbarians want from us.

Creating an underclass of people among us — and providing tacit government permission to hate and distrust them — makes it that much easier for recruiters to convert young people already here into becoming the terrorists we fear from abroad.

But one thing Wall's letter to the prime minister accomplished immediately was to expose the divisions already separating Canadians over the issue of fast-tracking immigrants from a war-ravaged country where not a whole lot of us can really tell if any faction there can be deemed “the good guys.”

I followed the news coverage of this story posted by major news outlets in Canada: CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, National Post and Maclean's.

In every case, the story about Brad Wall's letter was presented fairly and evenly. A lot of people like to complain that Canada's news media is inherently biased (invariably against them, whatever their position on any issue may be). But I saw no such bias in their coverage, which supposedly will become the primary information source for most Canadians on this issue.

Where the bias played — and it played huge — was in the comments section.

I don't pretend to know if — or how — online each news media moderates the comments that appear at the bottom of stories. Most often, I don't read them. People should have better things to do than walk through the valley of the trolls.

But this time, I looked at the comments below the stories, and here's what I found — at least in the news window of Monday afternoon. I found a wall. Between Canadians.

On the CBC site, the posted reactions were almost completely to reject Wall's request that we suspend the refugee program. A (very few) supported Wall's request, but overwhelmingly, readers were appalled that a Canadian political leader would say what he did.

Comments on the CTV site, on the other hand, were virtually 100-per-cent Brad Wall-for-prime-minister. Even if under an assumed name, it seemed nobody wanted to challenge the group.

Readers of the Globe story seemed more willing to see two sides of an issue, but generally, the comment consensus was that Canada should push ahead with the refugee program.

Maclean's only had one posted comment. Maybe their filtering system is more rigid, or maybe more Canadians wait to read Maclean's in print than online. But that comment rejected Wall's request.

I repeat, the news stories themselves were entirely balanced and should not elicit the kinds of comments that appeared. Not on their own, anyway; this is a reflection of readership, not of journalism.

National Post, for their part, did something outstanding, in my view. They interviewed surviving people who went through our last similar epoch of fear and racism: Jews who fled Europe to Canada at the outbreak of the Second World War. One had escaped the Dachau concentration camp, ended up in Canada, and spent years under armed guard as a suspected enemy of Canada.

If anyone would have reason to not be a Nazi sympathizer, it would be these Jews (plus a few communist academics and homosexuals fleeing persecution in their homelands).

Frederick Blair, immigration minister at the time, was determined to keep Jews out of Canada by any means, but shiploads of prisoners of war — including at least 2,300 Jewish civilians — found themselves behind barbed wire in Canada. One prison camp was called the Plains of Abraham camp. Doubly ironic, when you think about it.

It speaks to the times that these young men did not become suicide bombers, but rather a group of upstanding Canadians after the fact. But the infuriating unfairness and racism behind their imprisonment cannot be explained away by that.

Wall's request is far too close to Frederick Blair's campaign for comfort. That Canada turned away shiploads of Jewish refugees during the Second World War to their deaths does not speak well of us trying to do the same today with Syrians.

Many Canadians may not know who the “good guys” are in the fighting in Syria, but we do know the refugees are not the bad guys.

Ultimately, morally and politically, we are obliged to let them in.