We Have a Choice in Canada

He was 15 with the most hopeful and cheerful attitude. He was excited to go back to school and when we met in a make-shift temporary shelter for migrants along the US-Mexico border, he asked me to bring him books so he could learn English. Over the days I spent at the border giving people legal information about the refugee process, he slowly opened up to me about the violence he had been threatened with because he wouldn’t join the gangs back home in Honduras. “I want to come to the US to go to school, but also, I really just want to live.”

I lost him for months in the US immigration system—a system designed to exact suffering to deter unwanted migration. This child would spend over 4 months incarcerated. He was released in the middle of the night having been transferred to New Jersey, with an ankle monitor and a paper with his next court date. We found each other through Facebook in April and he shared over breakfast: “I’ve had to take a job washing dishes at a restaurant to pay private monitoring fees and rent. I don’t know how to fight my case because I don’t have a lawyer and can’t afford one.” He’d lost his childish hope. I lost him again as he became another number, another victim of inhumane populist US policies.

In May, Prime Minister Trudeau commemorated the anniversary when Canada denied South Asians on the Komagata Maru to even dock in Canada so they could apply for asylum. He said, “immigration officials, enforcing discriminatory laws of the time, did not allow the ship to dock.” Canadians pride themselves on a commitment to our very un-americanness. But as I return home to Toronto after working for four years as an immigration and civil rights lawyer in the United States, I see familiar signs that point to Canada moving in very American directions. The Liberal government is not immune to this populist wave.

Just in April, the Ontario Conservative Ford government implemented austerity budget cuts putting our most Canadian institutions under attack. The budget cut funding from public education, social assistance, and nearly all legal services serving immigrants and refugees – affecting a much wider community of people than those Ford rallied against and divided to win. This is reminiscent of Trump-style populism and power.

The US has dehumanized people migrating from specific parts of the world to justify closing the border to refugees, banning Muslims, and detaining over 30,000 immigrants in mostly private detention centers. These policies have become entrenched as private corporations that run detention centers and private monitoring have profit incentives and exert political pressure to expand the marginalization of immigrants and refugees.

Canada’s reality is far from the entrenched systems in the US. But our history and our trajectory is not. Governments like the Conservative Ford government are part and parcel of a global populist conservative wave. It is premised on the same brand of dehumanization and division we criticize elsewhere, while it’s political choices will quickly dilute the very institutions that promote Canadian values--multiculturalism, equity--that we publicly pride ourselves upon.

As Canadians, we have a choice to make. Our immigration system has always benefited some over others. Sometimes discrimination has been blatant: shameful acts like the Chinese head tax and the Komagata Maru incident or the turning away of Jewish refugees on the St. Louis ship during the Holocaust. More often, its discrimination has been less conspicuous: destabilizing migrant workers' lives by tying them to seasonal visas with no path to citizenship and reliance on their employer, and our current points-based system which rewards people of means despite the fact that many immigrants will not ever be permitted to work in the very professions that scored them the points to get here.

Today, in stripping funding from Legal Aid Ontario, the Ontario provincial government is removing access to legal services from immigrants living under the poverty line. These cuts will result in many more migrants remaining detained, effectively losing their ability to fight against their deportations. Meanwhile, the same federal government that celebrates diversity as “our greatest strength” is considering amending the Safe Third Party Act, closing the border to all those escaping through the United States. Where Komagata Maru refugees were stopped at our shores, refugees would be stopped at our land border. This does not need to be our path. 

We must stop borrowing from American division and hate-based populism and instead start learning from its deep histories of popular organizing and resistance. For, just as I witnessed deep suffering along the border, I was also a part of radical mass mobilizations of thousands of legal volunteers who have gone to the border to prepare asylum seekers, stemming some of the harms from the US government’s policies.

In Canada, this will require action from all of us - from the federal government acting to fill the gaps left from populist provincial games, public servants acting to protect long-standing Canadian institutions, and the public urgently mobilizing and unifying against hate. We cannot rely on our institutions to re-balance themselves. Our institutions and governments are ultimately only a reflection of the values we are willing to fight for.