- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,219
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
Most of Canada’s premiers are outdoing each other with generous offers to accept Syrian refugees by the thousands over the next six weeks, but their promises are all but meaningless.
Premier Kathleen Wynne re-stated her promise again on Tuesday. “It’s our responsibility to be open to the world,” she said in Toronto.
Wynne said in September that Ontario can take 2,500 refugees by the end of this year and 10,000 by the end of 2016. Since she joined forces with Justin Trudeau in the federal election campaign and he promised to get 25,000 refugees to Canada within a couple of months, she got more ambitious in her rhetoric but hasn’t offered a new number.
“I think we can do our best to bring over those 25,000 people and what we have committed to in Ontario,” she said Tuesday. She also recommitted to an $8.5-million fund of provincial money for the cause (in addition to $2 million the province is sending to overseas aid groups).
Quebec’s target is a striking 6,000 people this year alone. Alberta’s Rachel Notley says her province can take 2,000 to 3,000, British Columbia’s Christy Clark says B.C. can take about 2,500. New Brunswick, which has a government department dedicated to boosting its stagnating population figures, wants 1,500. Prince Edward Island figures it can handle about 100 families.
At the other end, Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall wants Trudeau to put refugees off until after a comprehensive review of how we screen them, more like the American governors who spent Monday declaring Syrians aren’t welcome in their states.
The thing is, the premiers don’t control who comes, they don’t control where refugees settle, they don’t control the support systems that back refugees up.
The federal government can sponsor refugees, guaranteeing to cover their living expenses at first and helping them find their way. Charities and groups of private citizens can do the same, after proving at length that they can handle the responsibility.
The provinces (other than Quebec, which has a special arrangement) can’t sponsor refugees directly. Which is ironic, because a pretty big part of sponsorship is agreeing to help a new arrival with provincial services, from getting a health card to enrolling in school or language classes. Much of the expense in sponsoring a refugee is to cover basic living expenses that would otherwise fall to the welfare system, which the province runs.
A government program, no matter how ably staffed, won’t cook you a meal at home, give your kids hand-me-down winter clothes, explain the offside rule in hockey and otherwise teach you to weave your own personal way into the Canadian fabric. Classes can only go so far. And yet the federal government does its own refugee-sponsoring. So refugees do get by without the personal touch.
It would be a lot simpler if a provincial government could say yes, we’ll take 1,000 and plug them into all these systems that we run anyway. Instead, Wynne has to say yes, we’ll take 10,000, and, uh … look, I’m going to need the feds and tens of thousands of individual Ontarians to put up a lot of money and do a lot of work and fill out a lot of forms to make it work.
Concretely, says the province’s immigration ministry, the $8.5 million will be spent on “Expanding culturally appropriate community-based settlement services and resources and ensuring access to services in Arabic” and “Providing specialized community based services and supports such as mental health and trauma counselling, programs for children and youth, employment readiness services, and targeted services for women.”
There’s also some vague stuff about “supporting Ontario communities in their efforts to sponsor and welcome refugees” and backstopping private sponsorship efforts, but in the two months since Wynne made her initial pledge, nobody’s figured out what that means.
People well capable of guiding a refugee family through setting up the basic life they can expect to start with here do not all have the tens of thousands of dollars they need to do it unless they get together in unwieldy large groups. Likewise, some people with money and good intentions won’t know how to relate to refugees who’ve fled their homelands in fear of their lives.
When lives are at stake, as refugees’ lives are, letting the provinces directly support refugees with the provincial services they need anyway would streamline a process that’s way more baroque than it needs to be.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Premier Kathleen Wynne re-stated her promise again on Tuesday. “It’s our responsibility to be open to the world,” she said in Toronto.
Wynne said in September that Ontario can take 2,500 refugees by the end of this year and 10,000 by the end of 2016. Since she joined forces with Justin Trudeau in the federal election campaign and he promised to get 25,000 refugees to Canada within a couple of months, she got more ambitious in her rhetoric but hasn’t offered a new number.
“I think we can do our best to bring over those 25,000 people and what we have committed to in Ontario,” she said Tuesday. She also recommitted to an $8.5-million fund of provincial money for the cause (in addition to $2 million the province is sending to overseas aid groups).
Quebec’s target is a striking 6,000 people this year alone. Alberta’s Rachel Notley says her province can take 2,000 to 3,000, British Columbia’s Christy Clark says B.C. can take about 2,500. New Brunswick, which has a government department dedicated to boosting its stagnating population figures, wants 1,500. Prince Edward Island figures it can handle about 100 families.
At the other end, Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall wants Trudeau to put refugees off until after a comprehensive review of how we screen them, more like the American governors who spent Monday declaring Syrians aren’t welcome in their states.
The thing is, the premiers don’t control who comes, they don’t control where refugees settle, they don’t control the support systems that back refugees up.
The federal government can sponsor refugees, guaranteeing to cover their living expenses at first and helping them find their way. Charities and groups of private citizens can do the same, after proving at length that they can handle the responsibility.
The provinces (other than Quebec, which has a special arrangement) can’t sponsor refugees directly. Which is ironic, because a pretty big part of sponsorship is agreeing to help a new arrival with provincial services, from getting a health card to enrolling in school or language classes. Much of the expense in sponsoring a refugee is to cover basic living expenses that would otherwise fall to the welfare system, which the province runs.
A government program, no matter how ably staffed, won’t cook you a meal at home, give your kids hand-me-down winter clothes, explain the offside rule in hockey and otherwise teach you to weave your own personal way into the Canadian fabric. Classes can only go so far. And yet the federal government does its own refugee-sponsoring. So refugees do get by without the personal touch.
It would be a lot simpler if a provincial government could say yes, we’ll take 1,000 and plug them into all these systems that we run anyway. Instead, Wynne has to say yes, we’ll take 10,000, and, uh … look, I’m going to need the feds and tens of thousands of individual Ontarians to put up a lot of money and do a lot of work and fill out a lot of forms to make it work.
Concretely, says the province’s immigration ministry, the $8.5 million will be spent on “Expanding culturally appropriate community-based settlement services and resources and ensuring access to services in Arabic” and “Providing specialized community based services and supports such as mental health and trauma counselling, programs for children and youth, employment readiness services, and targeted services for women.”
There’s also some vague stuff about “supporting Ontario communities in their efforts to sponsor and welcome refugees” and backstopping private sponsorship efforts, but in the two months since Wynne made her initial pledge, nobody’s figured out what that means.
People well capable of guiding a refugee family through setting up the basic life they can expect to start with here do not all have the tens of thousands of dollars they need to do it unless they get together in unwieldy large groups. Likewise, some people with money and good intentions won’t know how to relate to refugees who’ve fled their homelands in fear of their lives.
When lives are at stake, as refugees’ lives are, letting the provinces directly support refugees with the provincial services they need anyway would streamline a process that’s way more baroque than it needs to be.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
