6 Canada’s Complicated History of Refugee Reception
6 Canada’s Complicated History of Refugee Reception
Stephanie Bangarth
Ever since the war, efforts have been made by groups and individuals to get refugees into Canada but we have fought all along to protect ourselves against the admission of such stateless persons without passports, for the reason that coming out of the maelstrom of war, some of them are liable to go on the rocks and when they become public charges, we have to keep them for the balance of their lives.
F.C. Blair, Director, Immigration Branch, 1938.
[A]s human beings we should do our best to provide as much sanctuary as we can for those people who can get away. I say we should do that because these people are human and deserve that consideration, and because we are human and ought to act in that way.
Stanley Knowles, MP, House of Commons, 9 July 1943.
Separated by a mere five years, these two statements reveal much about the historic contradictions of the Canadian approach in dealing with refugee crises. In fact, remove the dates and these statements would not seem out of place in the current Canadian divide over the global refugee crisis in which there are more than 60 million people fleeing war, persecution, and danger. This is a number that surpasses the amount of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, when my father and my grandparents fled Hungary by train and horse-led wagons to come to Canada in April of 1951, but not before spending six years stateless in Austria. They were among the more than 120,000 refugees who made their way to Canada between 1947 and 1953, thanks to contract labour schemes or government, family or church group sponsorships. Make no mistake, the selection criteria were guided by racial and political bias, along with a heavy dose of economic self-interest.
Of all the elements of Canada’s immigration policy, those relating to the admission of refugees have been the most controversial and the most criticized. But for much of Canadian immigration history, neither politicians nor public officials made any distinction between immigrants and refugees. It was not until the passage of the 1976 Immigration Act that refugees constituted an admissible class for resettlement. Until that time, special refugee admission schemes were made possible only with the passage of orders-in-council which suspended normal immigration regulations and permitted relaxed criteria for screening.
Fast forward to 2015 and a United Nations report reveals that Canada is at the bottom of a top-15 list of industrialized receiving countries, with 13,500 claims reported in 2014. In comparison, Sweden, a small Nordic country with 9.6 million people and a quarter of Canada’s population, admitted 75,100 refugees last year. In January the Conservatives pledged to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over a period of three years, of which Immigration Minister Chris Alexander reported 2,500 are now in Canada. In a crass display of politicking last month, the Conservatives promised to inc