Will the photo of Alan Kurdi change anything?

When the electoral jostling is over, will the migrant boy's death push Canadians to reopen this country’s closing doors for those yet to seek our help?

A paramilitary police officer carries the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi, 3, after a a boat ferrying the boy and other migrants to the Greek island of Kos capsized.

By: Humera Jabir Published on Sun Sep 06 2015
Conservative officials’ sudden-onset compassion for refugees stinks of insincerity. Refugee-bashing rhetoric, manoeuvring to deny and decrease protection, and ramped-up efforts to detain and deport asylum-seekers have been the hallmarks of the last decade of Ottawa’s refugee policy. That Conservative officials today have changed their vituperative tune after the shocking death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, his brother, and mother is too late and too hard to believe by far.

In the last decade, the prime minister, former immigration minister Jason Kenney, and the current immigration minister, Chris Alexander, have worked tirelessly to paint an image of asylum-seekers coming to Canada as “bogus” claimants, “queue-jumpers” and abusers of Canada’s immigration system.

Alexander appeared on air Wednesday to defend the government’s record on refugee protection, claiming that Canada “remains a model of humanitarian action” and is “the most generous country to refugees in the world.” But the Conservative record on asylum-seekers is anything but generous or humanitarian; it is one of open hostility at worst and foot-dragging at best.

This bold avowal of humanitarianism comes from the very minister who not one year ago admonished the Ontario government for providing refugee claimants with access to primary and urgent health care after Ottawa cut those benefits, saying “[s]imply arriving on our shores and claiming hardships isn’t good enough. This isn’t a self-selection bonanza, or social program buffet.” The Federal Court of Canada has since ruled that the government’s policy amounted to cruel and unusual treatment because it put at risk the very lives of “innocent and vulnerable children in a manner that shocks the conscience and outrages our standards of decency.”

Moreover, Harper officials now express aggrieved concern for the lives of migrants attempting treacherous crossings by boat in the Mediterranean, but never extended this generosity when asylum-seekers arrived at Canada’s own shores. When the MV Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea, two ships carrying Tamil asylum-seekers, reached the West Coast in 2009 and 2010 respectively, the government turned the asylum-seekers, who had spent months at sea, into a public spectacle, portraying them as a boatload of potential terrorists and frauds. Many of the 492 asylum-seekers arriving on the MV Sun Sea were held in detention for months and called “bogus” claimants by Kenney, though nearly two-thirds of those whose cases have been resolved were finally accepted as refugees within five years of arrival.

The Conservative government’s paranoia towards asylum-seekers has reached such extremes that the United Nations in July raised concerns over Canada’s detention of irregular migrants for indefinite periods of time, calling on Canada to use detention as a “measure of last resort” and with “reasonable time limit[s].” Harsha Walia, writing in the Vancouver Sun this August noted that “[o]ver the past 10 years, the federal government jailed an average of 11,000 migrants per year, including up to 807 children, without charge. Canada is one of the only Western countries to have indefinite detention.”

Today, Conservative officials may stand at their election podiums and extend heartfelt condolences to the Kurdi family but these are crocodile tears. In practice, the Harper government views asylum-seekers who use human smugglers as criminals first rather than desperate, vulnerable, and even courageous people like the Kurdi family, whose circumstances forced them to take the most heart-wrenching of risks to seek a better life for themselves and their children.

Minister Alexander’s foot-dragging on resettling Syrian refugees from abroad is now infamous — not that that’s stopped the Conservatives from trying to politically exploit yet another promise to resettle 10,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees if re-elected. What’s more, the Conservatives have also turned resettlement into a discriminatory practice focusing on religious minorities, even in the face of criticism from interfaith leaders who have called on Canada to resettle Syrians based on need not faith.

Whether or not more Syrians are admitted to Canada in the aftermath of the Kurdi family’s tragedy will not, however, change the fact that Canada’s refugee policy on the whole and in the long-term remains ungenerous and anti-humanitarian.

And once the photographs fade and the world inevitably forgets the pain of one family just as it has ignored the plight of millions before this week, what will remain unchanged is a decade of Conservative manipulation of the refugee system designed to make it more inaccessible, more discriminatory, and more difficult for refugee claimants to have their cases heard on their full merits.

And when the electoral jostling is over, will the death of the Kurdi children truly push Canadians to reopen this country’s closing doors for those yet to seek our help?

Humera Jabir is a law student at McGill University in Montreal.