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Ottawa is ready to help if the federal government chooses to let more people fleeing the Middle East come to Canada, Mayor Jim Watson writes in a letter just sent to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander.
“The City of Ottawa has a very strong track record of looking after the most vulnerable,” the letter says. “We remain committed to working with all relevant stakeholders to assist with the settlement of those affected.”
It’s an echo of the decision by Marion Dewar, Ottawa’s mayor a generation ago, to declare that the city was ready to accept 4,000 refugees fleeing Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia.
But only an echo. And a faint one.
Dewar is remembered as practically a saint for leading “Project 4,000,” pulling Ottawans together to put up their own money to help settle desperate refugees here after they’d risked their lives in perilous crossings of the South China Sea. Her son Paul Dewar, running for re-election in Ottawa Centre, invokes her memory as he criticizes the federal government’s handling of Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
At the time, her decision was — depending on how you looked at it — brave, impulsive, reckless. It was certainly big.
“It was a government idea. It wasn’t our idea. When you have leadership, the public responds,” says Howard Adelman, a now-retired professor at York University who worked to get refugees from Southeast Asia to Canada, and spent his academic career studying refugee issues.
Dewar always deflected credit, saying she was the political catalyst for something regular people wanted to do anyway.
“Marion Dewar may have presented it that way, but it wasn’t the case,” Adelman says. The people responded to politicians who told them what was possible, he says.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had fled their homes in the second half of the 1970s, oppressed by the communist government that had driven the Americans out of South Vietnam. Many of them got on overloaded, leaky boats to escape, hoping for safety in places like Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
If Vietnamese forces caught them, they could be shot. They were robbed by pirates. Their boats sank. Thousands died.
Photos of an overloaded vessel, the Hai Hong, made it to Canada in 1978, and started drawing attention to the problem, says Ron Atkey, a former Progressive Conservative minister of immigration.
“That had a similar effect to what we’re seeing with that terrible image of the boy on the beach,” he says.
As their numbers grew in coastal encampments in the countries they fled to — and they were joined by people fleeing similarly repressive governments in Cambodia and Laos — the refugees’ receptions got more and more hostile. By 1979, the countries of Southeast Asia declared themselves done. They’d take no more refugees and demanded help from outside the region in dealing with those already ashore.
A UN conference worked out a deal: Vietnam would relent on letting people go, so they wouldn’t have to sneak out on boats. Its neighbours would keep accepting them, too, but places like Malaysia would only be waystations — they’d have to leave for places like the United States, France, and Canada.
Famously, Marion Dewar was on a short holiday in the Gatineaus, stuck inside watching TV because it was raining, when the crisis captured her. She came back to work at City Hall and brought it up with a colleague, who told her it wasn’t really her problem.
Right, well. Dewar called the federal immigration department and said we’d take 4,000.
As mayor, Dewar didn’t have any particular powers to accept refugees to Ottawa. She just had a big heart and a pulpit. She summoned charities and faith groups to a meeting and said they all needed to get together and figure out how we were going to do it. She put out a call for private sponsors, people who’d pledge, individually or in groups, to help new arrivals with shelter and clothing and food and work. She organized an information session at the Civic Centre a few days later and 2,300 people showed up.
Dewar got hate mail — horrible racist hate mail, some of it — and plowed on anyway.
Similar efforts got going in other cities and the next month, in July 1979, Atkey announced Canada would take 50,000 refugees from Southeast Asia, instead of the 8,000 it had previously agreed to. The feds would sponsor half with public money and Canadians would privately sponsor the rest.
Thousands of people in Ottawa signed up as sponsors, organized by almost 350 community groups. Officially, a sponsor group needed five adults with combined incomes of at least $100,000 a year ($315,000 in 2015 dollars), and the immigration department said sponsoring a family of four could be expected to cost about $9,000 (or $28,500 today). In all, what became known as “Project 4,000” helped about 3,800 refugees come here.
The current situation is different, says Adelman: both larger and simpler.
The United Nations has processed 150,000 people and essentially certified that they’re refugees who now just need somewhere to go. In 1979, the same preliminary work hadn’t been done — Canada just didn’t fuss about it. We sent a few dozen immigration officials to Southeast Asia to work from morning till night processing applications and they got through 60,000 applications in a year-and-a-half.
He acknowledges that in 2015, when it comes to refugees from the Middle East, there are security concerns, worries that would-be terrorists will slip in with innocent people just trying to run away.
“It can be handled if you’re determined to do it,” Adelman says.
Atkey — who chaired the federal Security Intelligence Review Committee when Brian Mulroney was prime minister — says Islamic militancy in 2015 actually isn’t that different from communism in the Cold War.
“There were concerns in 1979 that we were going to get closet communists coming in as agents of the North Vietnamese government, or criminals,” Atkey says. Then, immigration officers processing applications were given wide discretion to “smell out troublemakers.” Also, refugee applicants would tell officials who the bad apples were. The number of refugees admitted then who caused problems in Canada was negligible, he says.
But worries about security are hard to allay, particularly if the politicians don’t try, he says.
“What we have is a government that really works to appeal only to a certain kind of voter, not to Canadians as a whole,” Atkey says.
“Today, they get caught up in numbers between Iraq refugees and Syrian refugees and double-counting and the timeframe,” he adds, which only confuses things. We could have a target for accepting refugees from the Middle East and not focus on whether they’re from Syria or Iraq or some muddled place along the border under nobody’s real control.
A bureaucracy that moves slowly dampens enthusiasm in the would-be private sponsors any large-scale resettlement effort would need, Adelman says.
He’s worked with business groups in Calgary and Halifax and found employers would, in general, be happier to hire refugees rather than temporary foreign workers who are just going to have to leave Canada after a few years. But they want them now, not someday.
Pledging to support a new arrival, or a whole family, is a big commitment. People might think they could do it now but not be sure they’ll still be up to it if it takes years before that family arrives.
“You cannot get private sponsors to really respond unless they know the refugees will come within three months,” Adelman says.
Moving quickly is strictly a matter of political will, he adds.
“If you have leadership, it doesn’t matter whether Tories or Liberals … they had that sense of dedication and commitment and ideas to get this job done. And when they have that, it makes it very simple,” he says.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“The City of Ottawa has a very strong track record of looking after the most vulnerable,” the letter says. “We remain committed to working with all relevant stakeholders to assist with the settlement of those affected.”
It’s an echo of the decision by Marion Dewar, Ottawa’s mayor a generation ago, to declare that the city was ready to accept 4,000 refugees fleeing Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia.
But only an echo. And a faint one.
Dewar is remembered as practically a saint for leading “Project 4,000,” pulling Ottawans together to put up their own money to help settle desperate refugees here after they’d risked their lives in perilous crossings of the South China Sea. Her son Paul Dewar, running for re-election in Ottawa Centre, invokes her memory as he criticizes the federal government’s handling of Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
At the time, her decision was — depending on how you looked at it — brave, impulsive, reckless. It was certainly big.
“It was a government idea. It wasn’t our idea. When you have leadership, the public responds,” says Howard Adelman, a now-retired professor at York University who worked to get refugees from Southeast Asia to Canada, and spent his academic career studying refugee issues.
Dewar always deflected credit, saying she was the political catalyst for something regular people wanted to do anyway.
“Marion Dewar may have presented it that way, but it wasn’t the case,” Adelman says. The people responded to politicians who told them what was possible, he says.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had fled their homes in the second half of the 1970s, oppressed by the communist government that had driven the Americans out of South Vietnam. Many of them got on overloaded, leaky boats to escape, hoping for safety in places like Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
If Vietnamese forces caught them, they could be shot. They were robbed by pirates. Their boats sank. Thousands died.
Photos of an overloaded vessel, the Hai Hong, made it to Canada in 1978, and started drawing attention to the problem, says Ron Atkey, a former Progressive Conservative minister of immigration.
“That had a similar effect to what we’re seeing with that terrible image of the boy on the beach,” he says.
As their numbers grew in coastal encampments in the countries they fled to — and they were joined by people fleeing similarly repressive governments in Cambodia and Laos — the refugees’ receptions got more and more hostile. By 1979, the countries of Southeast Asia declared themselves done. They’d take no more refugees and demanded help from outside the region in dealing with those already ashore.
A UN conference worked out a deal: Vietnam would relent on letting people go, so they wouldn’t have to sneak out on boats. Its neighbours would keep accepting them, too, but places like Malaysia would only be waystations — they’d have to leave for places like the United States, France, and Canada.
Famously, Marion Dewar was on a short holiday in the Gatineaus, stuck inside watching TV because it was raining, when the crisis captured her. She came back to work at City Hall and brought it up with a colleague, who told her it wasn’t really her problem.
Right, well. Dewar called the federal immigration department and said we’d take 4,000.
As mayor, Dewar didn’t have any particular powers to accept refugees to Ottawa. She just had a big heart and a pulpit. She summoned charities and faith groups to a meeting and said they all needed to get together and figure out how we were going to do it. She put out a call for private sponsors, people who’d pledge, individually or in groups, to help new arrivals with shelter and clothing and food and work. She organized an information session at the Civic Centre a few days later and 2,300 people showed up.
Dewar got hate mail — horrible racist hate mail, some of it — and plowed on anyway.
Similar efforts got going in other cities and the next month, in July 1979, Atkey announced Canada would take 50,000 refugees from Southeast Asia, instead of the 8,000 it had previously agreed to. The feds would sponsor half with public money and Canadians would privately sponsor the rest.
Thousands of people in Ottawa signed up as sponsors, organized by almost 350 community groups. Officially, a sponsor group needed five adults with combined incomes of at least $100,000 a year ($315,000 in 2015 dollars), and the immigration department said sponsoring a family of four could be expected to cost about $9,000 (or $28,500 today). In all, what became known as “Project 4,000” helped about 3,800 refugees come here.
The current situation is different, says Adelman: both larger and simpler.
The United Nations has processed 150,000 people and essentially certified that they’re refugees who now just need somewhere to go. In 1979, the same preliminary work hadn’t been done — Canada just didn’t fuss about it. We sent a few dozen immigration officials to Southeast Asia to work from morning till night processing applications and they got through 60,000 applications in a year-and-a-half.
He acknowledges that in 2015, when it comes to refugees from the Middle East, there are security concerns, worries that would-be terrorists will slip in with innocent people just trying to run away.
“It can be handled if you’re determined to do it,” Adelman says.
Atkey — who chaired the federal Security Intelligence Review Committee when Brian Mulroney was prime minister — says Islamic militancy in 2015 actually isn’t that different from communism in the Cold War.
“There were concerns in 1979 that we were going to get closet communists coming in as agents of the North Vietnamese government, or criminals,” Atkey says. Then, immigration officers processing applications were given wide discretion to “smell out troublemakers.” Also, refugee applicants would tell officials who the bad apples were. The number of refugees admitted then who caused problems in Canada was negligible, he says.
But worries about security are hard to allay, particularly if the politicians don’t try, he says.
“What we have is a government that really works to appeal only to a certain kind of voter, not to Canadians as a whole,” Atkey says.
“Today, they get caught up in numbers between Iraq refugees and Syrian refugees and double-counting and the timeframe,” he adds, which only confuses things. We could have a target for accepting refugees from the Middle East and not focus on whether they’re from Syria or Iraq or some muddled place along the border under nobody’s real control.
A bureaucracy that moves slowly dampens enthusiasm in the would-be private sponsors any large-scale resettlement effort would need, Adelman says.
He’s worked with business groups in Calgary and Halifax and found employers would, in general, be happier to hire refugees rather than temporary foreign workers who are just going to have to leave Canada after a few years. But they want them now, not someday.
Pledging to support a new arrival, or a whole family, is a big commitment. People might think they could do it now but not be sure they’ll still be up to it if it takes years before that family arrives.
“You cannot get private sponsors to really respond unless they know the refugees will come within three months,” Adelman says.
Moving quickly is strictly a matter of political will, he adds.
“If you have leadership, it doesn’t matter whether Tories or Liberals … they had that sense of dedication and commitment and ideas to get this job done. And when they have that, it makes it very simple,” he says.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
