Now Carry This Tiny Soul With You

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