Were the stats and
figures and buried news stories too boring? Is that why? We heard words like
“Bill C-31” and processed it as “blah blah blah?” Is that it?
Because it’s like
everyone is surprised and shocked and mortified at a world where tiny Alan
Kurdi could be lying lifeless, his sweet, pudgy toddler hands limp beside him,
his adorable little running shoes with blue pocket shorts that his Mom picked
out for him that morning, the kind that he could run along a beach in and fill
with stones and treasures, now all filled with water, and drowned, like his
lungs, like his brother’s and his mom’s, like his family’s dreams.
It’s as though this
is a surprise, as though the policies and laws were never meant for an innocent
little smiling soul named Alan Kurdi. But of course they were. They always
were. Policies and laws and voter apathy and closed borders and protection of
privilege all have human faces for consequences.
Sometimes the human
faces look like my friend Rolston, who did, against many odds, arrive safely in
Canada and live in my home until he found places to volunteer and work and
contribute. I was with him when he got his deportation letter from our
government, when he crumpled to the ground and sobbed giant man tears while he
read that he would be one of the many faces that our new policies and laws
would reject. He would be a statistic. That’s right, he read it. Our laws have
changed so that even if you get to Canada safely, our former tribunals that
would hear your case are now made of only one person, who may or may not have a
background that would help them understand this area of law, may or may not
have their own anti-immigrant or homophobic prejudice, has no peers with them
on the board anymore to provide checks and balances, and can now choose not to
have to look at you and tell you their decision in person on the day of your
hearing, face to face, human to human. They can make you wait months while they
have someone type it in a form letter and mail it to you. That person can now
even choose to send you back to countries that are on a list of places to which
Canada didn’t used to deport people, or (as in my friend Rolly’s case) to
certain persecution, which we agreed as a country many years ago we’d not do.
And sometimes the human faces look like little Alan, blue pocket shorts, red
T-shirt, squishy little smiley cheeks, cute pudgy toddler hands that clung to
his parents looking for a reassurance and safety that this world, and our
country, denied them.
We can’t be that
shocked; we’ve had a place in this world the whole time. We still do.
I need us to care
about that picture, for sure. I need us to be the kinds of humans who sob when
they see the lifeless humans we failed to keep safe, and who are inspired,
because of Alan, to give and help a little more. But I need us to care BEFORE
our babies are lying face-down in the sand. I need us to own our place and our
responsibility in this world, and to do something with that.
For starters, we as
Canadians could all start paying a little more attention to the decimation of
Canadian values happening right under our own noses. Since 2006, we’ve changed
how we talk about people fleeing for safety, and we’ve made it a whole lot
harder to get here. We’ve held onto all the privilege that we already have, and
we’ve set up a system and a way of talking about this issue that makes it so we
don’t have to share. And in the grossest protection of privilege yet, we’ve
gone from being the country that gave many of our relatives a new chance at
life, to being a country that closes its doors on refugees, and fills our
immigration numbers instead with only the richest.
I need us to pay
attention to this shit.
I need us to look
at all the other pictures of beautiful little Alan Kurdi, the pictures of him
playing with his brother Galip, of him at the playground in his cartoon Space
Riders T-shirt, of him hamming it up for the camera, and I need us to realize
that our country, with our new refugee laws under this current government,
turned that little face away. Alan and Galip should be here, safe, protected,
alive, but we made it impossible for them to enter. We said no, we didn’t want
to share our privilege with them.
When your
leadership style leans toward autocratic, and you’re trying to get your people
to drink your Kool-Aid, language often gets used like a weapon. You get out
your message using words to paint pictures of your invented reality; you
suppress anything and anyone that isn’t your message; and you carefully craft
your sentences to deflect any blame off of you and onto any casualties
themselves. Let’s break that down:
1. The picture that
was painted
When Stephen Harper
decided to close our doors, the picture he painted for us was one of terrorists
trying to bust the gates down. We needed to protect ourselves. And Harper
needed us not to see those numbers as human faces. They were terrorist adult
men waving ISIS banners, not families like ours. But the facts on the ground
are this: the majority of people fleeing this madness in Syria right now are
young families, people who think about potty training and have favourite books
and playlists and stuffies, people whose lives and futures are so horrifying
that good parents are packing their beautiful children into boats to get them
away from all that stands to harm them on their land. And that’s why I need us
to look at Alan Kurdi’s happy pictures and to see Alan’s smiling toddler face
every time we hear Harper use words like “tightening our border” or “bogus
refugee claims.” I need us to realize that the “economic burdens” Harper talked
about were always humans, some of them tiny, two of them named Alan and Galip.
I need us to care about words much, much sooner.
2. Suppression of
dissent
For the people who
have been paying attention to words all along, and who HAVE been speaking up,
Harper has made it infinitely harder to dissent: peaceful protestors, under
Bill C-51, can now live in the fear of being legally arrested as a potential
terrorist threat. I didn’t pick that word. Harper did. Protestor now =
terrorist. Where we used to value the discourse of ideas, we’ve now completely
outlawed dissent. Reporters have been muzzled by controlled access, campaign
ralliers have to sign gag orders, and as Sean Devlin found out last week, you
can be arrested at a gathering if your T-shirt pays tribute to a dead Syrian
boy that Harper would rather not be reminded about, and you refuse to take it
off or leave. It’s tyrannical.
3. Deflection of
blame
When Canadians saw
what a failed refugee claim really looks like, a toddler’s beautiful, innocent
face, a name, a family that was desperate for safety, there was a collective
murmur of disbelief from the trusting minions, and Harper needed a response. Go
back and look at the message coming from the Conservative camp the day after we
saw the picture of Alan’s body. It wasn’t “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t “yes, our
policies did hurt this family, and I own that.” It wasn’t a leader with the
ability to grant freedom wringing his hands and saying, “I’ve fucked this all
up. We need to change things.” The message from the Conservative camp was to
point the finger back at Alan’s family, and to say that Alan’s aunt was
confused, and that Canada did not ever receive a refugee application for her
brother’s family. It doesn’t matter that that’s not even the point. It doesn’t
matter that she did have her MP hand-deliver her request to Chris Alexander,
the Immigration Minister himself, or that our laws were making it impossible
for her to get any family here because who can stop to make photocopies and
clear administrative red tape when you’re fleeing a war zone? Or that sending
papers back and calling them incomplete is a tactic our Immigration and Refugee
Board uses to delay refugees entry, or that finally paying a smuggler to have
her brother and his family cross in a boat seemed like the only option left
because there wasn’t time left to play paperwork games with Harper’s
appointees. What does matter is that in those early hours, the message we got
was “Harper is absolved. It’s Alan’s family’s fault.” Well, it’s not. The fault
lies with all of us, because all of us have a place in this world. And each of
us who lives in a safe country that has enough room and the stuff of life to
share, and in which we have a vote and a voice, carries a piece of that
responsibility.
And so, when you
see Stephen Harper on a stage saying, “Canada is doing all it can to help
immigrants and refugees,” I want you to see Alan Kurdi’s happy smile, and to
hear this truth instead:
Under Harper,
Canada accepts less than .1% of the world’s displaced people.
I want you to think
of Alan Kurdi smiling his big-little-boy smile at the top of that slide in the
playground when you read this:
Of the people
actually allowed into Canada under Harper’s rule, only 9.93% are refugees.
The vast majority
of successful applicants to Canada are now economic immigrants with money and
privilege.
Put Alan Kurdi in
your heart when you read the ways that Harper has actively changed the laws to
make it MUCH harder to apply and get refugee status. We deny far more refugees,
and we have secret tribunals made up of a single board member. Under Harper,
there has been a 50% decrease in refugee claims, and a 30% drop in accepted
refugees. The number of family-class immigrants to Canada dropped by 20% under
this government, not because fewer people applied, but because we made changes
to keep people out. We’ve done things like increase the income threshold for
family sponsorship to prohibit vulnerable families and invite more wealthy
ones. We apparently don’t like to share our stuff.
Of the small number
of people Canada does accept, Harper has chosen the random target of 875 of
these people a year to LOSE their refugee or permanent resident status. In
2014, this government spent a staggering $1.8 billion on immigration
enforcement to keep people out. It’s now possible in our country for a
permanent resident to be deported, without appeal, for a traffic offence
because we’ve committed to getting rid of 875 of them somehow. Even the small
number of people Harper’s government accepts can no longer hope for permanent
safety.
Under Harper, we
are a country that has deported 118,000 people. Look at Alan’s happy pictures,
and read that again.
We’ve drastically
cut any services we used to offer to newcomers. If Alan’s family had arrived
here safely, they would have found that this government has cut over $53 million from
immigrant services, refugee healthcare, and ESL training that had been set up
to welcome and help people be thriving members of our communities. It can’t be
because we needed to save money, because we apparently had that other $1.8
billion kicking around to allocate to refugee exclusion.
In the whole
history of our country, we made fewer changes to our immigration system than in
the years since Harper was elected. From 1867 until after 2000, Canada made
only 19 significant changes to our immigration policies. We were a steadily
welcoming country for a very long time. Since then, we’ve introduced over 100
new immigration policies and ministerial instructions that close our doors and
tighten our borders.
Look at Alan’s
smiling face again, and think on the many ways that we have severely restricted
permanent residency and citizenship under Harper, and have used language that
invites us to exclude immigrants and treat newcomers with suspicion.
We are so opposed
to sharing our wealth with the world’s most vulnerable people that we now
deport refugee applicants to places that Immigration and Refugee Board members
themselves acknowledge will lead to applicants facing certain persecution, and
to countries with official moratoriums on deportation. But we shoo these humans
away anyhow.
We’ve put 87,000
people into an immigration detention centre. Not because they’re bad, but
because they’re immigrants. Yes, that’s right. This government detains
immigrants, without charges, in a jail. Refugees are the only people in Canada
who can now be jailed without a specific charge. We can now choose to keep you
behind bars while we process your papers. For as long as that takes. Years
even. EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVEN of the people we’ve done this to, with lifelong
consequences to their emotional and mental health, are children. Keep Alan
Kurdi’s smiling face on your heart while you read that sentence again.
We are punishing
our most vulnerable neighbours in an attempt to keep all that we have for
ourselves. I need us not to accept language that divides. When we believe in a
message that tells us to fear our neighbours, we all lose. This is not a “them”
and an “us” story. This is the story of humanity, and we’re all in this
together.
The hoarding of
privilege will always have a human cost. I need us to remember Alan Kurdi’s
smiling face when we read of policies and statistics and changing laws. Carry
him with you in the ways you treat and think about people who are not you. And
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, please take his beautiful smile with you when you vote.
And know that you have a place in this. We all do. Sometimes it takes a tiny,
brave toddler to teach and remind us.
Dara Douma
September 2015
