Back in 1999, Kosovo was not a great
place to be. The whole Balkan region was breaking up — violently —
into various new states based on ethnic origins that did not like or
trust each other.
Local militias got access to police and
military arms as governance broke down and entire regions were
“cleansed” of families who no longer belonged there, being of the
“wrong” ethnic origin for whoever locally claimed to be in
charge.
Canada intervened by evacuating about
5,000 people from areas where terror, rape, arson and murder had
become the norm, and resettled about 2,000 refugees into Canada —
all within a period of months.
Gerry Van Kessel was a senior
bureaucrat in the Canadian government at the time. He had a title
with a lengthy name: Director General, Refugees Branch, Department of
Citizenship and Immigration. Over his career he was also the the
co-ordinator of intergovernmental consultations on asylum, refugees
and migration policy in Geneva.
So he knows a thing or two about how
bureaucracies work to implement government policy around determining
who is or is not a refugee. That's important, because as a signing
nation of accords on refugees, Canada is obliged to take them in.
Well, that was then and this is now.
Taking in 2,000 refugees from a European region with Western-standard
notions of justice and rule of law would be but a short introduction
to the refugee crisis in Africa and the Middle East that Canada faces
today.
In the intervening time, we elected a
Conservative government that left more than a third of positions on
the Citizenship and Immigration board empty, while abroad, thugs and
terrorists got much more efficient at creating refugees. Canada's
backlog of refugee claims became an embarrassment, and the government
tried to fix it by putting an eight-day limit on processing claims,
as well as designating “safe countries of origin” from which a
faster claims process could proceed.
Now, even that has turned out to be
just a short introduction to the refugee problem that Canada faces to
day.
So it shouldn't be a surprise that even
as professional a group as Canada's civil service would slip a few
gears while attempting to process 25,000 refugee claims from Syria
in just a few months.
Van Kessel, a long champion of our
civil servants as non-partisan professionals, doesn't like how the
process is going. So, over the new year he gave an interview on the
matter.
He sees — rightly — that when the
force of political policy hits the wall of practical reality,
something has to give. A newly-elected government cannot undo the
policy and practice of a 10-year government that had a completely
different ideology concerning refugees and immigration, all in a
matter of months. Much less while taking in 25,000 new permanent
residents from abroad.
What irked Van Kessel was the constant
changing of targets. From the policy introduction last March, to the
swearing-in of the new government in November to now, targets got
serially readjusted such that the 25,000 Syrian refugees would be
identified by the end of 2015, and resettled by the end of 2016.
For a lot of governments that's
“immediately” as things can get for a project that large,
involving that many thousands of vulnerable individuals.
Van Kessel just doesn't like the
messiness of it all. Which is strange, because he says he immediately
saw the mess arriving when the Liberal refugee policy was announced.
Because he'd been there before, and he knows how things work (or not
work).
Very well, complain that it's a mess,
and that politics is being played in public while the professionals
work in the background. How, exactly, is that a change, except in
scale?
So far, Red Deer has 26 new permanent
Canadian residents from Syria. The expectation is that we may receive
as many as 60. Non-profits like Catholic Social Services and a long
list of others, plus many volunteers and donors are putting in long
hours getting them housed, settled, with medical attention and kids
in school — the whole list of connections that families have with a
city.
To use Western terms, this isn't our
first rodeo. We've done this before.
Bottom line, when people become aware
of need, they step up to help. That was proven over the Christmas
season when local charities feared they might not reach their annual
fundraising goals. Last-minute, they got there, and then some.
Nationally, setting the politics —
the goal — was important. Without that, there'd likely be no new
arrivals in Red Deer. That politicians will change the specifics of
the goal when policy runs up against practice, is just something that
happens.
Meanwhile, people keep on doing the
right thing with the situation and resources in front of them. That's
the Canada I like to see.
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