Can Public Opinion Change Canada’s Refugee Laws?
On 2 September 2015, the bodies of brothers Alan (3) and Galib (5) Kurdi washed up on a beach in southern Turkey. The boys drowned alongside their mother Rehan after the boat carrying them and eight other Syrian refugees capsized on its way from Turkey to Greece.
Photos of Alan Kurdi’s body lying facedown in the surf are now ubiquitous in the Canadian press, as are photos of his weeping father, Abdullah (40), the only member of their family to survive. Alan has become the face of the human suffering within the Syrian refugee crisis. Since news broke that the family was trying to immigrate to Canada, photos of his drowned body have changed the issue from a European one to a specifically Canadian one.
Syrian refugees have been fleeing the country since the civil war began in 2011, but the numbers have dramatically increased in the last two years. According to UN data, 886,000 asylum claims were filed globally in 2014, a 45% increase from 2013. It marks the highest level of asylum claims since the beginning of the Balkan conflicts in 1992. The two largest groups filing are Syrians, with 150,000 claims, and Iraqis, with 68,700.
The Kurdi family’s story highlights the problems facing thousands of Syrian refugees trying to flee their country. Abdullah’s sister, Tima, immigrated to Canada over two decades ago, and now lives and works in Vancouver. Initial reports indicated that Tima tried to sponsor her brother’s application to Canada. Despite personal attention from Fin Donnelly, the MP for Port Moody/Coquitlam, the family says the application was rejected in June, “owing to the complexities involved in refugee applications from Turkey,” the Ottawa Citizen reports.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada, however, says it never received a refugee application for that particular family, though it did receive an application for Abdullah and Tima’s brother, Mohammed. That application was rejected as incomplete. Chris Alexander, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, said he received and read a personal letter from Tima Kurdi pleading on behalf of Mohammed’s application.
As more contradictory facts emerge regarding the Kurdi family’s application, it becomes clear that Syrian refugees face extremely onerous complexities and red tape, especially those attempting to leave from Turkey.
The Ottawa Citizen reports that there is a backlog of Syrian refugees in Turkey trying to escape to Canada. Kurds routinely face extreme discrimination in Syria, including the arbitrary denial of documents such as passports, which prevents them from either registering as refugees with the UN or applying for the necessary exit visas to leave Turkey. Without correct paperwork, their ability to file for refugee status in host countries is severely impaired. Entry into Canada is almost impossible for those missing this crucial paperwork; since Canada’s refugee policy has been tightened, there are few other options for hopeful refugees.
The Canadian Council for Refugees is pushing for Immigration Canada to implement temporary measures which would allow Syrians with family in Canada to be allowed entry in order to process their applications for immigration in safety. With legal channels effectively barred, growing numbers of desperate refugees are fleeing Syria through whatever opportunities they can find, even dangerous ones.
While Alexander—who has temporarily suspended his re-election campaign in the wake of the emergency—maintains that Canada “has one of the most generous per capita immigration and refugee resettlement programs in the world,” UN data brings this claim into question. A 2014 UNHCR report placed Canada at the bottom of a top-15 list of receiving countries, just five years ago Canada was ranked fifth. Even balancing for GDP and population size, Canada takes a much smaller proportion of refugees than the US and Western Europe. In 2014, Norway—a country with a little less than a third of Canada’s population—admitted more than five times the number of refugees than Canada did (75,100 to Canada’s 13,500).
The Toronto Star’s Nicholas Keung attributes the drop in Canada’s successful asylum seekers to the federal government’s changes to the refugee system in 2013. Though Alexander took to Twitter to assert that “Canada remains a model of humanitarian action & we have to accept that we will not be able to resettle all of those refugees,” the fact remains that Canada is admitting far fewer refugees than other wealthy nations, even as the crisis escalates.
The Syrian crisis has become a salient point in the election cycle, as party leaders have released statements regarding the Kurdi’s tragedy. Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau have come out as extremely critical of recent Conservative policy changes that have made it more difficult for refugees to get into Canada, while Stephen Harper has continued to express his party’s approach to immigration in terms of national security.
What’s clear, though, is that the photograph of Alan Kurdi has galvanized large segments of the Canadian population who last week would have been content to view the Syrian exodus as a problem for other borders, not our own. This is not business as usual. It is a crisis, one that Canadians recognize now specifically affects us and implicates us as Canadians. If the Kurdis had not died in the Aegean, they might have been our neighbours.
As students of the law we are being made sensitive to the complicated interplay between law on the books and the realities of people’s lives. Red tape in the form of an “incomplete application” stamp and an inflexible application procedure has concrete consequences.
As future lawyers, we’re learning about both the judicial system’s potential to effect change, and its limits. We also know that public opinion and social movements can be as powerful in effecting legal change as victories in the courts. Already Torontonians are attending fundraisers, donating to the Toronto-based LifelineSyria, and Goldblatt Partners LLP is privately sponsoring a Syrian family and encouraging other law firms to do the same. We don’t all have to become refugee lawyers to see movement on this issue.
The tragedy of Alan, Galib and Rehan’s deaths occurred during an election cycle, which means that even though their tragedy is being reduced to campaign talking points, it also opens up the possibility for change. Politicians on all sides of the spectrum are being forced to cede more and more time to address the groundswell of public sadness and outrage that was created by the image of Alan Kurdi lying face-down in the sand on a gray beach in Bodrom.
Canada has indeed been a model of humanitarian action in the past. If the public outcry at the deaths of the Kurdis is any indication, Canadians are hoping we will be again.