Something To Ponder — Raising the drawbridge to Canada

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/07/2015 (4125 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — Immigration and its offspring, citizenship, are growing in prominence on Canada’s national agenda. The increasing strictures imposed by the Harper government are causing a spate of heart-rending stories in the media, bringing the topics to public attention.

Add to this news from abroad about the rising tide of desperate people, 60 million now, internally displaced in their homeland or refugees from the IS, civil wars or cruel dictators, flooding Europe and other places.

Then mix in climate change, high unemployment in some places (especially among youth), a quadrupling of the planet’s population in just 100 years, unstable economies and the shift in wealth so one per cent of the world’s population has as much as everyone else added together.

And don’t forget the flame-fanning ubiquity of the Internet.

You haven’t been able to sponsor your relatives as immigrants to Canada for more than 20 years, unless they are within a nuclear-family definition

Is this a recipe for more revolutions, as experienced in Europe beginning in 1789?

Is democracy itself threatened as fewer voters (especially the young) participate, as governments such as Canada’s make it harder to qualify for citizenship (creating a non-voting underclass). Is Canada’s strategy the right one as we gradually raise the drawbridge, making Canada less welcoming to migrants?

It didn’t begin with the Harper government. Successive governments, whether Progressive Conservative, Liberal and now Conservative, have gradually changed the immigration tone. There are many examples.

The Mulroney government cut in half the number of government-assisted refugees resettled annually. The Chrétien and Martin governments allowed only about 3,200 privately sponsored refugees to be admitted each year, about half of what the Harper government now allows (still little in the face of the need).

Gradually over several years, designer immigrants, middle- to upper-class, well-heeled financially, educated and with a high level of English or French, have increasingly been preferred.

You haven’t been able to sponsor your relatives as immigrants to Canada for more than 20 years, unless they are within a nuclear-family definition.

You can sponsor and bring here your parents (or grandparents) within an annual numerical limit, if they live long enough to reach the top of the queue. But forget about your brothers or sisters, let alone your aunties or your cousins. They can’t come.

Now the Harper government has reduced the qualifying age for immigrant children, from 22 down to 19. How wise is that? It’s for one simple reason. Children between the ages of 19 and 22 are less likely to resettle and integrate easily, hence less likely to be able to contribute to the economy.

Therein lies the true reason behind what is going on. It’s about the economy.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act of 2002 makes it clear. Canada’s immigration policy is baldly stated to be “a labour market strategy.” In the reality of an aging population and a birth rate too low to replace us, we must have immigrants to keep the machines and services running.

It’s not about building a humanitarian Canada; it’s all about money, and it’s a short-term view at that. Yet the typical qualifying immigrant will be either retired or dead in 35 years. It will be their offspring that will fill the jobs then, sustaining the nation.

The Harper government reflects the culmination of this trend toward an exclusionary, mean-spirited policy. The final, revealing straw is the citizenship rules. The application cost has gone from $100 to $630. You must be tested (at your cost) for language proficiency to a higher benchmark level, and the pass-the-knowledge-test cutoff age has gone up from 55 to 65.

The government says it is protecting Canadian citizenship by making it harder to get. Oh really? Who benefits? If anyone, it is the established order and certainly not the newcomers. And why now, when for years earlier waves of immigrants were able to participate in the electoral process under the old rules? There is an unpleasant, elitist smell to this.

The issues are finally about Canadian values. Is it really all about the economy or does Canada stand for something greater? Are Canadians so invested in the established order, in their entitlements, that the short-term view is preferred while humanity suffers and the planet turns toward chaos?

I have asked several immigration ministers of the past if their ancestors could have qualified to get into Canada under the rules they now administered. Get in they did, and they participated and built the nation; and they voted. The ministers have all answered “no,” they wouldn’t have qualified.

There is something wrong with this picture.

» Tom Denton is the executive director of Hospitality House Refugee Ministry in Winnipeg. His column was also recently published by the Winnipeg Free Press.