By Travis Poland
Canada likes to advertise itself as being a country whose people are accepting and non-judgemental, and while positive steps have been taken, it is hard to give credit to this illusion.
Positively speaking, CTV reported in February that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised Canada’s involvement with the resettlement of Syrian refugees, calling it an act of international solidarity. The Liberal government boasts on their #WelcomeRefugees website that they have already met their goal of 25,000 refugees and Canada is in the gradual process of accepting more.
The Syrian refugees are not the first that Canada has assisted. In 1956, Canada accepted citizens fleeing Soviet oppression after the Hungarian Revolution. In the late 1970s and 80s, Canada took in a large number of Southeast Asian refugees, primarily from Vietnam. Incidentally, these events occurred during the Cold War and by accepting refugees fleeing communism, Canada was able to be seen as fighting communism without going to war.
Unfortunately, this welcoming hand has not always been extended. Before World War II, Canada was anything but accepting of the world’s refugees. Barbara Ann Roberts stated in her book Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada, 1900-1935, “Canada is a peculiar nation. Peopled by immigrants, it is a country, paradoxically, which hates immigration.”
During the first two decades of the 20th century, Canada was a growing and expanding colonialist state, with leaders deeply entrenched in the preference to populate the country with people who looked, spoke and prayed like themselves. The 1911 Census reports that 49 per cent of immigrants to Canada were from the British Isles and another 16 per cent were from the United States.
An incident that highlights these discriminatory sentiments was the fate of the Komagata Maru’s 1914 voyage. The ship was filled with over 300 mostly Sikh refugees from India fleeing poverty and religious persecution. All the passengers were legally British subjects, but the Canadian government turned the ship away when it arrived in Vancouver. It was forced to return to India, upon which 20 passengers were killed in an encounter with a British gunboat that sought to arrest the refugees, according to the Ontario Human Right Commission.
Only a few months before the start of World War II, a ship named the MS St. Louis was filled with over 900 German-Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. After being shunned from other countries, they tried Canada. The ship was turned away and some passengers from the ship later died in Nazi concentration camps. The Canadian Council for Refugees states that Canada only accepted 5,000 Jewish refugees during the 12 years of Nazi rule in Germany, one of the worst records among any democratic country. When asked about how many Jewish immigrants Canada would accept after World War II, an immigration officer stated “none is too many.”
The number of Syrian refugees that Canada has accepted is still a far cry from the number Germany has taken in — the country registered nearly a million refugees in the first 11 months of 2015 alone, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Yet even Canada’s small number is having ripple effects upon others seeking refugee status here, people from other parts of the world who also face persecution or war.
In an article published in the Tyee in January, Aganze Bihamba, originally from the Congo, which is currently embroiled in violent skirmishes between ethnic groups, recounts the difficulty he faces in trying to bring his three sisters to Canada from Nairobi. With sponsorship costs out of his reach at $30,000, he must seek financial aid from charitable donors, but has been given the excuse that they are already doing their part for Syrian refugees or that they are “unwilling to contend with the lengthy processing times in processing African refugees.”
The Globe and Mail exposed in February that “processing times for non-Syrian refugees are often years longer than for those who are part of the government’s current target program.” If the Canadian government — under intense public scrutiny — was able to remove the layers of red tape and bureaucracy in order to fast track the Syrian refugee project, they could make the refugee process easier for people from other parts of the world.
Canada may be less openly xenophobic and suspicious than it was in the past, but the water is not yet clear. Anti-refugee rhetoric has been increasing and there are numerous online petitions asking the Trudeau government to halt the movement of refugees. These petitions are shrouded in Islamophobia and are spreading misinformation regarding terrorism, the Middle East and Islam.
New Canadians come from all around the world and contribute to the unique cultural mosaic that is Canada. The Canadian government should be educating the public on why accepting refugees is good for the country, the world and individual refugees. Already, the current state is better than the Canada of yesterday, but we still have a long way to go.
It may be best to treat the current state of affairs not as an end goal, but as one stop on the continuum of immigrant acceptance in Canada.
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 8 No. 6 (March 2016).
