Refugees and Canada
Contemporary Issues and Real Stories

GEORGE MELNYK and CHRISTINA PARKER

No one chooses to become a refugee. It is a condition forced on people—by warfare; by political, religious, and gender-based persecution; by ethnic cleansing; by persistent violations of basic human rights; or, increasingly, by the environmental consequences of climate change. As many Canadians are aware, the world’s refugee population has risen sharply over the past decade. By the end of 2019, the figure stood at 33.8 million, only a few million shy of the entire population of Canada. According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), of these 33.8 million individuals who had fled their homelands, 26.0 million were “refugees” as defined by the United Nations, while the remainder were either asylum seekers (4.2 million) or displaced Venezuelans (3.6 million). Added to these were another 45.7 million internally displaced persons, who make up the remainder of the 79.5 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide—that is, one out of every 97 people (UNHCR 2020, 2, 8). Although these are staggering numbers, the total number of refugees that are resettled in other countries is about 0.4 percent, or about 100,000 annually (UNHCR 2020, 8). Despite these relatively low resettlement figures, the world has seen a surge of anti-refugee and anti-migrant in various developed nations.

Because the rhetoric of fear of “the other” is powerful, the language and actions of those who resist that rhetoric need to match that vehemence. This is especially important in Canada, a country that takes pride in its current reputation for compassion and inclusion. Historically, worries about uncontrolled immigration have been fanned from time to time by media and political leaders. These attitudes have defined Canada as much as the current mythology of openness has. This book questions to what extent Canada deserves a benign and welcoming reputation. As research suggests, whether Canadian government policy has been as humanitarian as people tend to assume is a matter of debate. In hopes of shedding additional light on this question, this book offers a series of first-person narratives written by refugees themselves and by people who work with them. These are stories from the frontlines written by people with direct experience of Canadian policies and procedures. The conflicting emotions that refugees experience, together with the sometimes troubling insights from those who provide support, can help us to understand what Canada does well and what it doesn’t.

WHERE WE STAND TODAY

Like most countries, Canada does not accept limitless numbers of refugees each year. Rather, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) sets annual immigration targets, which include figures both for refugees resettled from abroad and for asylum seekers (“protected persons”), as well as for the number of new residents who will be admitted on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. According to targets set in the fall of 2018 (IRCC 2018), Canada’s goal was to admit 31,700 resettled refugees in 2020—although the government would cover the cost of only 10,700 of these refugees, while the other two-thirds (21,000) would be privately sponsored refugees.¹ In contrast, the Canadian Council for Refugees was calling for a target of 20,000 government-assisted refugees (see CCR 2018), almost twice the IRCC figure for 2020. In addition to these resettled refugees, IRCC set a target for the admission of 18,000 “protected persons” in 2020—that is, asylum seekers whose claims have been accepted by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) (IRCC 2018). In its 2019–20 departmental plan, however, the IRB noted that “an inventory of more than 75,000 claims has accumulated, representing more than two years of work at current funding levels” (IRB 2019, 4). Even if only half the existing claims (37,500) are eventually accepted, at a maximum of 18,000 admissions per year, clearing this backlog effectively renders it impossible to accept any new claimants for at least two years.

Although the backlog had been building up for some time, much of it accumulated in the wake of the US presidential election in November 2016. The arrival in office of Donald Trump sparked a sudden upsurge in what the IRB terms “irregular border crossers,” that is, asylum seekers who enter Canada from the United States without going through an official port of entry, usually with the intention of making a claim for refugee status once they are safely inside Canada. These new claimants had little choice but to cross the border “irregularly.” Had they instead attempted to cross into Canada at an official entry point and claim refugee status at that time, they probably would have been turned back in accordance with the Canada–United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which requires asylum seekers to make their claim in the United States if they arrive there first, on the presumption that the United States is already a safe haven. Many of these border crossers are originally from countries such Haiti, Syria, Nepal, Somalia, and Yemen, whose citizens have temporary protected status in the United States. However, in light of the harsh attitudes toward “illegal aliens” promoted by President Trump, in tandem with his efforts to withdraw protected status for citizens of certain countries, these asylum seekers fear deportation, and so they attempt to find a more reliable place of safety in Canada (Chiasson 2018).²

From early 2017 through June 2020, the IRB received nearly 60,000 claims from “irregular” border crossers, of which roughly half were still pending at the end of this period. In the first three months of 2020 alone, the IRB received close to 3,500 new claims, although, in the following three months (April to June), the number plummeted by almost 90 percent as the COVID-19 pandemic set in.³ In mid-March, the Canada-US border was closed to non-essential travel, and IRCC suspended refugee settlement operations, leaving many privately sponsored refugees stranded (see Ilcan 2020). At the same time, the government announced that, for the duration of the crisis, it would no longer accept refugee claims from irregular border crossers, who would instead be sent back to the United States (Austen 2020). The situation provoked outcry from refugee advocacy organizations on the grounds that Canada has a legal obligation not to turn refugees away (see Coletta 2020; Dickson 2020).

These asylum seekers “are not trying to sneak into Canada undetected,” writes refugee law scholar Sean Rehaag (2019). They are simply trying to avoid immediate deportation back to the United States—the probable outcome were they to present themselves at a regular border station. Once across the border, they generally seek out Canadian authorities in order to make a refugee claim. Yet these border crossers have often been portrayed in the media as “queue jumpers” who are trying to bypass the standard refugee application procedure. In the imagination of some Canadians, they have come to symbolize the feared Other that political leaders in many countries have been railing against. Despite their relatively small numbers, these “irregular” arrivals have heightened anxiety and concern about Canada being “flooded” by unwanted people who might “steal jobs,” or increase the taxpayer’s burden, or dilute the national identity (Bryden 2018; Vomiero and Russell 2019). The fact is that Canada has accepted more than a million refugees over the past four decades, without any significant social or economic disruption. But, for some Canadians, the fear remains.

In contrast to the suspicious and even openly hostile reception given to irregular border crossers, Canadians extended a warm welcome to the resettled Syrian refugees who arrived in 2015–16, in flight from a country where war has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. A survey conducted in October and November 2017 revealed that 7 percent of the respondents had been directly involved in the Syrian refugee sponsorship program, while an additional 25 percent indicated that they knew someone who had (Environics Institute 2018, 35; see also Adams 2018).⁴ Such figures suggest a caring nation whose citizens reach out to those in crisis in other parts of the world, but these figures need to be contrasted with the situation of refugee claimants here in this country. Partly in consequence of the unanticipated increase in those fleeing the United States, the number of refugee claimants using homeless shelters in Toronto rose from 459 in late 2016 to 2,351 in April 2018, prompting Toronto’s mayor, John Tory, to renew calls to the federal government for aid. Only days earlier, the Québec government had announced that Montréal’s shelters were approaching capacity and would no longer accept refugee claimants. Tory was quoted as saying that, despite previous pleas for help with resettlement costs, no “meaningful co-ordinated response” had been forthcoming from Ottawa (Gray 2018).

Tory, who was among those who had helped to sponsor a Syrian family, went on to note that Canadians have a “moral responsibility to support refugees from around the world in their time of need” (quoted in Gray 2018). The moral responsibility he refers to should not apply solely to refugees abroad who have already passed government inspection, but to those who, out of fear for their safety, seek asylum in Canada at irregular border crossings. The current backlog of refugee claims means that asylum seekers may have to wait up to two years to have their cases heard. During that time, they may, if they are lucky, have the opportunity to take classes in English or French, to find a job, or to pursue an education, which would give them a head start should their claim be accepted. Then again, they may be left searching for a means to survive, as they await a verdict on their future.

A MIXED WELCOME: CANADA’S REFUGEE HISTORY

Canada’s selective response to new arrivals has a long history, one that is all but inseparable from the project of nation building. This history is also one of immigration, given that, until the 1970s, Canada made no formal distinction between refugees and immigrants. As James Hathaway puts it, “What mattered was not the motive for immigration, but rather the immigrant’s potential to contribute to the economic development of Canada” (1988, 679)—a principle that has continued to guide the country’s policies, even with regard to some refugees.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Canada welcomed such diverse (and often small) groups as Jews fleeing pogroms in tsarist Russia and likewise the Doukhobors, who, as pacifists, refused to do military service and whose spirituality conflicted with Russian orthodoxy. Under the patronage of Count Leo Tolstoy, the Doukhobors migrated to Canada, where they became part of the influx of settlers into the newly opened West—an expansion predicated, of course, on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

During the early twentieth century, Canada became an increasingly xenophobic nation, primarily in view of the arrival, over the previous two decades, of large numbers of immigrants from places other than Britain and northern Europe. At the time many Anglo-Canadians interested in establishing their powerful position as occupants and owners of Canada were alarmed by the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who were considered inferior because of their culture, language, religion, and mores. There was a widespread attitude that these immigrants could either not assimilate or, if they did, might dilute the national identity. Anglo-Canadian settlers reacted in part by embracing racist ideas drawn from social Darwinism and theories of eugenics, and the desire to ensure that Canada would remain a white country was reflected in immigration policy. In response to public pressure, the Immigration Act was amended in 1906 and again in 1910 “to provide for greater selectivity in the admissions process in order to weed out undesirable immigrants.” In addition, “Cabinet was given enhanced powers to exclude any class of immigrant where it deemed such exclusion to be in the best interests of the country” (Kelley and Trebilcock 1998, 14–15).

In a now infamous episode, which occurred in 1914, port authorities in Vancouver refused to allow a ship containing several hundred Punjabis (most of them Sikhs) to land. As Sarah Wallace points out, the incident took place in the context of widespread but unsubstantiated fears that people from South Asia were carriers of disease and hence “not fit to stay.” Ultimately, the SS Komagata Maru was forced to return to India. Although these would-be immigrants had not started out as refugees, they were greeted with hostility by the British upon their arrival in Calcutta. When officials attempted to arrest one of the passengers, twenty died in an initial skirmish with British troops, and most were imprisoned while an inquiry was conducted (see Wallace 2017, 140–47).

During World War I, Canada incarcerated thousands of “enemy aliens,” many of whom were non-Germanic people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including a great many Ukrainians. Then, in 1919, Canada banned further immigration of Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Mennonites. It was three years before Mennonite leaders were able to convince the federal government to lift the ban. By the end of the decade, approximately twenty thousand Russian Mennonites—refugees from religious persecution in the Soviet Union—had arrived in Canada. Most were farmers, and, because of their agricultural background, they settled chiefly in southern Ontario and western Canada. During the 1930s, however, official immigration dwindled to a mere trickle, given the high levels of unemployment during the Great Depression.

During World War II, Canada adopted a notably unwelcoming attitude toward Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. In 1939 Canada joined the United States and Cuba in refusing sanctuary to more than nine hundred Jews in flight from Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis. Its passengers, bound for the United States via Cuba, were not permitted to disembark in Havana and were also denied entry into the United States. When the Canadian government learned of the situation, it followed suit. The St. Louis had no choice but to return to Europe, where over a quarter of its passengers ultimately perished in concentration camps. In the twelve-year period from 1933 to 1945, Canada admitted fewer than five thousand Jews—a record that has been described as “arguably the worst of all possible refugee-receiving states” (Abella and Troper 1986, xxii; see also 63–66). In November 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized for Canada’s actions with regard to the St. Louis (just as he had done in May 2016 for the Komagata Maru incident).⁵

After World War II, Europe—now divided into a Soviet-controlled East and an Allied-control West—was awash with displaced people. Many of those displaced came to Canada, where they fuelled the postwar economy. As Hathaway points out, the Canadian government “maintained its focus on domestic economic interests by specifically seeking out the most ‘adaptable’ European refugees from among those in need of resettlement” (1988, 680), even as it was painting its actions as humanitarian. In addition, during the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, Canada showed a preference for refugees whose ideological sympathies aligned with its own, admitting thousands of anti-Communist refugees from the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956 and then doing the same after the revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The first non-white refugees admitted to Canada in large numbers were South Asian Ismaili Muslims who were driven out of Uganda in 1972. Shortly afterwards, Chileans fleeing the coup in Chile in 1973 were admitted to Canada, the first time the country had welcomed politically left-wing groups of refugees. By the end of the decade, Canada began admitting refugees from Vietnam and then from Cambodia and Laos as well. This broadening of immigration horizons was facilitated by the formal elimination in 1962 of the overtly discriminatory language that had, until then, characterized its immigration policies, including the infamous Chinese head tax in force from the late nineteenth century until just after World War II. In 1967, revised immigration regulations instituted a point system that, in theory, did not discriminate on the basis of nationality or race but instead evaluated potential immigrants primarily in terms of their skills, their level of education, their ability to speak English or French, and their family connections (if any) within Canada. While there may not be a point system specifically for use with refugees, the government does have to decide which refugees to accept for resettlement in Canada. When it comes to making these choices, there may be an underlying predilection for young, educated, and/or skilled refugees, in accordance with the point system’s emphasis on potential economic benefit to Canada.

THE CANADIAN REFUGEE SYSTEM

Until the early 1970s, Canada had no legal structures in place for dealing specifically with refugees. Although a beginning was made in 1973, with amendments to the Immigration Appeal Board Act, a formal system for admitting refugees was first laid out in the Immigration Act of 1976. Since then, the Canadian system for accepting refugees has continued to evolve in response to shifts in the political climate at home as well as developments abroad that have given rise to an ever-growing number of people seeking asylum. The admission of refugees to Canada is currently regulated under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which went into effect in 2002.

While it is possible to apply for refugee status from within Canada, most of the refugees who come to Canada have been granted asylum while still resident abroad. The Canadian government issues visas to refugees who have been vetted and whose total number corresponds to annual targets. In most cases, these resettled refugees have been recognized by UNHCR Canada as “Convention” refugees—that is, refugees as defined in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (which Canada signed only in 1969). Inland applicants, that is, those who apply for refugee status from within Canada, are evaluated through a process known as the refugee determination system, which is administered through the IRB. The IRB was established in 1989, when legislation introduced in 1987 by the Brian Mulroney government went into effect.⁶ The IRB adjudicates claims from individuals who have entered the country by standard legal means (for example, on student visas or as tourists) and subsequently made application for asylum. It also adjudicates the claims of those who entered the country “irregularly,” whether by walking across the border from the United States or by arriving on Canada’s shores by sea.

In 2012, the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act effected significant changes to Canada’s refugee determination system. These changes elicited strenuous criticisms from human rights organizations, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. Critics pointed to unreasonable timelines: under the revised law, newly arrived refugees have only two weeks to file a claim, and a hearing must take place within 60 days—hardly enough time for an applicant to assemble adequate documentation. In addition, the rights of refugees from “designated countries of origin” (that is, countries regarded as “safe”) have been seriously curtailed. Timelines are even shorter, and, if rejected, these claimants are unable to appeal to the IRB and may face immediate deportation, even if they have successfully applied to the Federal Court for a judicial review of their case. Such claimants must also wait a year before they can apply for compassionate and humanitarian consideration, during which time they may well be deported. Moreover, under the revised law, those designated as “irregular arrivals” by the Minister of Public Safety are subject to mandatory detention if they are sixteen or older, and they have no right of appeal. If their claim for refugee status is ultimately accepted, they cannot apply for permanent resident status for at least five years, making it impossible for spouses and children who are still abroad to join them in Canada.⁷ All in all, such policies do not align very well with Canada’s image of itself as a welcoming country.

In the face of a growing backlog of refugee claims, the minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada launched an independent review of the IRB’s asylum processing procedures in June 2017. The resulting report opened with a clear assessment of the current situation: “The refugee determination system is at a crossroads. Once again it is dealing with a surge in claims that it is ill-equipped to manage, running the risk of creating a large backlog that, if not tackled promptly, may take years to bring to final resolution” (Yeates 2018, 1). The report recommended several measures that would streamline operations. Yet, as refugee policy analyst Robert Falconer pointed out in November 2019, “Despite these attempts at procedural reform, the number of claims processed by the IRB has continued to drop since peaking in March 2019.” By the end of September 2019, Falconer noted—a month in which 5,560 new claims were made but fewer than 2,880 processed—the number of unprocessed claims had reached 82,240 (Falconer 2019).

The delays take an enormous human toll. Even if refugee claimants are not held temporarily in a detention centre or threatened with immediate deportation, they face what must seem like an interminable wait for a decision on their case. This produces not relief but renewed psychological strain, as claimants struggle to adapt to life in Canada while living with the possibility that they will ultimately be forced to leave. In short, while the current system may appear on the surface to be respectful of human rights and of Canada’s commitments under the UN Refugee Convention, the refugee determination process is still vulnerable to massive overload, with little by way of a solution in sight.

It is, moreover, susceptible to abuse. According to an IRCC backgrounder, “All eligible refugee claimants receive a fair hearing at the IRB, an independent, quasi-judicial tribunal. Each case is decided on its merits, based on the evidence and arguments presented” (IRCC 2017). Yet over roughly the past decade, several researchers have called the fairness of the refugee determination system into question. Although IRCC’s reference to “evidence and arguments” clearly aims to suggest a rational and objective process, research conducted by Sean Rehaag has uncovered a subjective dimension to the review system. Examining data for 2017, Rehaag found vast disparities in refugee claim recognition rates across decision makers, with some adjudicators accepting nearly all the claims they reviewed and others accepting fewer than one in four. This variation, Rehaag says, is consistent with findings from earlier years, both before and after the revisions contained in Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act. In Rehaag’s estimation, “The persistence of unexplained variations in recognition rates across adjudicators in the new refugee determination system, combined with the devastating potential impact of false negative refugee decisions (i.e., refugees being returned to face persecution), make robust oversight mechanisms essential” (Rehaag 2018a).

But the issue of variance does not just involve adjudicators. It also involves Federal Court judges who preside over applications by refugees for a judicial review of the adjudicator’s decision. A separate study of judicial review determinations prompted Rehaag to conclude that an applicant’s chances of success depended in large measure on the judge, with one judge approving fewer than 1.5 percent of the applications considered and another approving nearly 78 percent (Rehaag 2012, 25). As Rehaag notes, these are high-stakes decisions, given that “if the Federal Court wrongly denies applications, the direct result is that refugees may, contrary to international refugee law, be sent back to countries where they face persecution, torture or death” (31). A follow-up study, which included data that postdated the 2012 revisions to the determination system, identified a similar pattern, prompting Rehaag to conclude that “refugee claimants whose applications for judicial review are denied continue to have good reason to wonder whether this was because of the facts of their case and the law, or whether they simply lost the luck of the draw” (2018b, 17).

An important factor in each case before the IRB is the credibility of the oral story of the claimant, especially when written documentation is limited. These oral accounts rely, of course, on memory, and, as Hilary Evans Cameron has pointed out, when claimants’ stories vary even slightly from time to time, decision makers tend to become distrustful. While acknowledging that in some cases gaps or inconsistencies in a claimant’s testimony may rightly undermine its credibility, she argues that such lapses are often misleading and “should never be used mechanically” (2010, 469). In her analysis, adjudicators—whose assumptions and perceptions are influenced by their Canadian training and perspective—often misconceive how memory operates, especially in stressful situations such as the IRB proceedings. Applicants who speak through interpreters are not only nervous about their applications and the formality of the proceedings but may still be dealing with past trauma. As a result, they can easily become confused or uncertain and so appear evasive or untruthful. These factors can be prejudicial to asylum seekers when the culturally biased and bureaucratic standards of authenticity that adjudicators bring to the cases result in applicants being judged unreliable or untruthful. As Evans Cameron concludes, “Many decision makers must fundamentally readjust their thinking about claimants’ memories if they are to avoid making findings that are as unsound as they are unjust” (469).

Concerns have also been raised about the increased use of detention by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) in recent years, enabled by the reforms of 2012. Not surprisingly, the IRCC website has little to say about detention, although the backgrounder they provide does offer a brief explanation: “People who are intercepted by the RCMP or local law enforcement after crossing the border irregularly are brought to the nearest CBSA port of entry or inland CBSA or IRCC office (whichever is closest), where an officer will conduct an immigration examination, including considering whether detention is warranted” (IRCC 2017). According to researcher-advocates Petra Molnar and Stephanie Silverman, the CBSA detained an average of 7,215 individuals per year in the period from 2012 to 2017, each of whom spent, on average, 19.5 days behind bars. Moreover, because parents who are placed in detention must decide “whether their children should be ‘housed’ with them or placed in foster care,” Canada does—despite claims to the contrary—detain children (Molnar and Silverman 2018b). The CBSA has acknowledged that, in 2017, 151 minors were held in custody with parents, and an additional eleven were detained unaccompanied by an adult (Shingler 2018).

In response to widespread criticisms, the government has professed concern about its detention system, yet little appears to have changed. In August 2016, Molnar and Silverman wrote: “Under international law, detention should be a measure of last resort. It should be non-punitive, non-arbitrary, and conducted with regard to due process, and must not sweep up asylum seekers or other vulnerable people. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in Canada” (Molnar and Silverman 2016). Their comments came on the eve of an announcement by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety—the minister responsible for the CBSA—of the government’s intention to upgrade its immigration detention centres and to increase the availability of alternatives to detention (CBC News 2018). In April 2018, Molnar and Silverman wrote: “The Canadian immigration detention regime is rife with violence, distress and despair. Detainees are separated from their families, denied access to legal counsel, faced with the removal of their kids and imprisoned in far-flung locations with little access to psycho-social supports and medical care” (Molnar and Silverman 2018a).

Delphine Nakache has drawn attention to another very troubling aspect of the use of detention—namely, the parallel it draws between asylum seekers and criminals. This parallel is thrown into high relief when, as is not uncommon, would-be refugees are housed in provincial prisons, rather than in immigration detention facilities. As Nakache observes, the incarceration of refugee claimants serves to segregate them from the surrounding social space. Prisons thus come to function in much the same way as internment camps, marking asylum seekers as “undesirables” (Nakache 2013, 100). Indeed, the criminalization of those seeking asylum—that is to say, the assumption that if they have crossed the border illegally they must be, by nature, criminals—is necessary to justify the application of punitive measures.

Given that Canada does not sit on the border of one of the world’s many conflict zones, its system is not equipped to cope with large numbers of asylum seekers. But there is another factor at work in Canada’s approach to refugees. As Hathaway writes, “refugees were admitted as part of the general immigration scheme, which was designed to promote domestic economic interests”—a circumstance that “has conditioned much of the modern legal evolution in the field of Canadian refugee protection” (1988, 680). This tendency to view refugees as a subset of immigrants is still in evidence today, both in government policy and in the public mind. In selecting refugees from abroad, the government still aims to balance humanitarian concerns with pragmatic considerations, including the country’s economic welfare, while complaints about border crossers often focus on potential competition for jobs.

The uncritical equation of refugees and immigrants is not only false but damaging, as it insidiously shifts the emphasis from humanitarian obligation to matters of economic benefit. Unlike immigrants seeking opportunities for a better future, refugees have been forcibly displaced. Many have been subjected to violence and have lived in fear of death—their own and/or that of immediate family members. Very frequently, refugees are suffering the effects of trauma. While escaping from a war zone or a refugee camp is no doubt a relief, they find themselves in an unfamiliar culture, surrounded by people speaking a language that may be entirely unknown to them, as they attempt to find housing and work. The scale of the disorientation can be overwhelming, and when we confuse immigrants with refugees, we risk losing sight of the conditions under which refugees arrive in Canada. This book aims to make these distinctions visible.

WHAT REFUGEE NARRATIVES TEACH US

In one way or another, the stories in this book are about self-transformation. Becoming a refugee means starting over: it means leaving behind one life and building a new one. Having to start over, often from a social, career, and financial position way below what refugees were accustomed to in their previous homeland, has been known to lead to mental health implications and distress (Beiser and Hou 2006; Hilario et al. 2018). But, as the narratives written by those who work or have worked with refugees suggest, supporting a refugee through this process is also transforming. It is difficult to help someone without becoming emotionally engaged in their experience, which then becomes part of one’s own experience. This sense of new beginnings lends a positive tone to these narratives. The contributors to this volume are understandably proud of what they have accomplished, whether in terms of adjusting to life in Canada or of making it possible for others to do so. Yet these stories also touch on the frustrations, the disappointments, and the deficiencies that mar Canada’s refugee acceptance system. While none of those who volunteered to tell their story set out to complain or criticize, their accounts offer a revealing counterpoint to Canada’s self-congratulatory image.

Several themes emerge in the narratives. One is the strain of adaptation to unfamiliar places, cultures, languages, and customs, and a concomitant sense of loss. Another is a sense of guilt, compounded by fears for those left behind. A third is the stigma associated with the refugee identity. Those who assist refugees speak of the obstacles posed by the bureaucratic process, about how they struggle to understand the situation those they are trying to support find themselves in, and of the personal rewards of seeing someone successfully adapt to life in Canada.

Victor Porter, whose political activity in Argentina ended in his imprisonment and torture, was ultimately able to escape to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee. But he is well aware that many others were not as fortunate, and he still regrets “the amount of pain and suffering that my detention caused to my parents and sister.” Their anxiety over his fate was very high. Once in Canada, he also felt the strain of adaptation: “I struggled to learn English, to understand the country, and to find and make my way. I worked as a dishwasher, delivered newspapers, became a cook, a beekeeper, a production manager in the first tofu wiener factory in the country.” In the end, he became an advocate for immigrants and refugees. The desire to give back is illustrated in other narratives as well. It is rooted in compassion, and yet it may also be a way of coping with a lingering sense of guilt, a feeling that those who were successful in finding a haven owe a debt to others.

Matida Daffeh, a human rights activist from The Gambia who came to Canada relatively recently, reiterates the theme of guilt. Daffeh was safe in Canada when she learned that her mother had passed away. “I thought of all the emotional trauma my mother had endured because of me,” she writes, “and I began to tremble. I felt guilty and sad that I could not be there to mourn with the rest of the family.” Not being able to share in a family’s normal life detracts from one’s sense of value and usefulness. The lack of freedom to travel to attend important family tragedies or milestones, and the resulting isolation, makes refugees feel both separated and imprisoned. Daffeh’s experience also illustrates the daunting nature of the refugee determination process. Given its complexities (including the need to fill out lengthy forms in either English or French), those who have solid legal counsel throughout the process fare much better. Without such expert legal advice, Daffeh might have failed in her claim.

Boban Stojanović writes: “The moment my partner and I decided to leave our country was the moment we became tired.” They were finally feeling the weariness of all those years of struggling for gay rights in Serbia, combined with the sense of exhaustion that comes from deciding to abandon a fight in hopes of a more peaceful existence. Stojanović applied for asylum after coming to Canada on a tourist visa, only to discover that, as a refugee, his life had become “one of lost privileges, limited rights, dependence on elementary things, and the inability to make any plan. Also, uncertainty.” In Serbia, Stojanović and his partner knew who they were, but by making a refugee claim they had to surrender their former selves—all their familiar points of reference—and turn to face the very hard task of becoming someone new.

Flora Terah, a women’s rights activist who fled to Canada for reasons of personal safety after her only child was murdered, was also obliged to start over, and she struggled to cope with the trauma she had endured. After coming to Canada, she tells us, “Even though I was enjoying people’s concern for my welfare, my thoughts were fixed on Kenya, and grief was chewing at me. None of my hosts noticed that underneath my smile there was grief, worry, and pain.” The pain in becoming a refugee involves not merely loss of place but loss of one’s former sources of emotional support. “Fleeing Kenya,” Terah writes, “had sucked a substantial amount of self-confidence and self-esteem out of me. I needed help.” As her story illustrates, refugees may feel considerable, if unspoken, social pressure to keep negative emotions out of sight—given that, consciously or not, would-be rescuers generally expect those they have rescued to be grateful and happy. As a result, refugees often grapple in isolation with sorrow, doubt, and depression.

Depending on the circumstances, refugees may also be left with an abiding sense of shame. Cyrus Sundar Singh writes of the Sri Lankan Tamils who were found off the shores of Newfoundland in 1986, crowded together in two waterlogged lifeboats in which they had floated for three days in the North Atlantic. Although Canada allowed them to remain, they arrived to a mixed reception. Many ended up working in Toronto restaurants as cooks and in other low-waged positions, always remaining invisible, ashamed of their identity as “boat people.” Here, we have a glimpse of the hierarchy that emerges among refugees. As we have seen, Canada has a distinct preference for “resettled” refugees who arrive in the country armed with an official welcome in the form of a visa issued abroad. Such refugees are a known quantity. “Irregular” arrivals are another matter, especially if they have little by way of education and skills. The Sri Lankan Tamils understood they had no invitation.

As many of these stories illustrate, refugees from countries in the Global South experience deeper forms of exclusion, owing to the persistence of racism in Canada. Stojanović, for instance, felt a greater sense of acceptance than, for example, did Terah. Although considerations of race or ethnicity have been officially expunged from Canadian immigration policy, they resurface in other criteria, such as level of education, fluency in English or French, and the ability of a new arrival to contribute to the economy. Likewise, refugees from countries whose nationals, either as immigrants or refugees, have established a strong presence in Canada have the advantage of advocacy by that group. Refugees from countries that do not have a previously established presence may face more difficulties because their support network is not yet established and they are more isolated.

As for those who tell the story of their assistance to refugees, we find there are both highs and lows. Mike Molloy, who worked on the front lines of the evacuation of South Asians from Uganda in the early 1970s, and William Janzen, of the Mennonite Central Committee, who contributed to the adoption of the ground-breaking policy on private sponsorship, both “feel privileged to have been involved with refugees,” as Janzen puts it, confirming the theme of personal reward. Katharine Lake Berz and Julia Holland, who sponsored an illiterate Syrian refugee family in 2016, provide a telling account of their frustration with waiting for the bureaucratic process to provide their refugee family. “We waited for weeks, then months,” they write. They asked themselves, “Were they ill and unable to travel? Had they decided against coming to Canada?” As sponsors, Lake Berz and Holland have learned that “refugees are not ‘lucky.’” They may have escaped death and destruction, but they live “in constant fear for the safety of their friends and relatives.” They fear they will never see them again.

Shelley Campagnola, who has worked a long time in the field, summarizes the overall situation this way:

The asylum system itself is a complex one that mixes politics, policies of scrutiny and suspicion, public perceptions, and opinionated rhetoric with the personal pain of real people. It tries to bring justice while not upsetting local budgets, international relationships, economic trading partners, and voters who too often are ill-informed and easily inflamed by incomplete media reporting.

Campagnola’s perspective on where Canada stands today is both accurate and insightful. For the most part, Canada has been insulated from major global flows of asylum seekers, and its asylum system is accustomed to dealing only with relatively small numbers. But forcible displacement is a growing phenomenon globally, and in many places the rhetoric of walls has sprung up in response. If, by contrast, Canada has so far been able to present itself as a model of tolerance, this is partly because numbers have remained low. How much longer this delicate balance can be maintained is anyone’s guess. But by reminding us that refugees are human beings, not statistics, the stories in this book prepare us to respond with compassion to whatever lies ahead.

It is important to remember that this book is not intended to be all-inclusive. We recognize that this handful of stories cannot possibly capture the full spectrum of the refugee experience. With respect to the refugees themselves, our goal was to emphasize the individuality of each person’s experience, which is inevitably influenced by factors such as gender, race, social and economic class, education, and language abilities, as well as the historical and cultural circumstances in which their migration occurred. Because we wished these voices to be heard without the mediation of a translator, we sought to identify contributors whose English was relatively fluent. It was unfortunately not feasible to include stories from people whose refugee claims were rejected, not only because such individuals can be hard to locate but also because some may still be in the process of appeal. We also wanted to highlight the variety of paths by which those who support refugees are led to their work. It is our hope that the voices presented in this text will spark deep reflection upon, dialogue with, and activism over how refugees are supported, integrated, and included in Canada.

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1 The figure of 21,000 includes 1,000 refugees to be admitted under the government’s PVOR (blended visa office-referred) program. Whereas private sponsors are ordinarily responsible for the financial support of refugees for an entire year, through the PVOR program, the government offers to cover the cost for a maximum of six months. For more information, see “Blended Visa Office-Referred Program: About the Process,” Government of Canada, last modified March 3, 2018, https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/refugees/help-outside-canada/private-sponsorship-program/blended-visa-office-program.html. In addition to these 31,700 resettled refugees, IRCC was planning to admit 4,500 persons on humanitarian and compassionate grounds in 2020.

2 In July 2017, this situation prompted the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International, and the Canadian Council of Churches to challenge whether the United States can reasonably be designated a safe third country for all refugees (“Legal Challenge of Safe Third Country Agreement Launched,” July 5, 2017, Canadian Council for Refugees, https://ccrweb.ca/en/media/legal-challenge-safe-third-country). In July 2020, the Federal Court determined that it cannot: the court ruled that that the agreement violates section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the right to life, liberty, and personal security. The federal government is appealing the decision, and the agreement remains in force until the appeal is heard.

3 “Irregular Border Crosser Statistics,” Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, last modified September 9, 2020, https://irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/statistics/Pages/Irregular-border-crosser-statistics.aspx.

4 A total of 1,501 people (a “representative sample,” according to Environics) took part in the survey (Environics Institute 2018, 1). A subsequent Environics survey, conducted in October 2019 as part of the institute’s ongoing “Focus Canada” series, examined attitudes toward refugees in general and found that, while 43 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement “Most people claiming to be refugees are not real refugees,” 39 percent agreed (Environics Institute 2019, 5).

5 For these apologies, see “Statement by the Prime Minister on the Anniversary of the Komagata Maru Incident,” May 23, 2016, https://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2018/05/23/statement-prime-minister-anniversary-komagata-maru-incident; and “Statement of Apology on Behalf of the Government of Canada to the Passengers of the MS St. Louis,” November 7, 2018, https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2018/11/07/statement-apology-behalf-government-canada-passengers-ms-st-louis.

6 This legislation generated considerable controversy. See the discussion in Hathaway (1988, 703–8), as well as his follow-up article (Hathaway 1989). See also the chapter by William Janzen in this volume.

7 For a useful summary of these criticisms, see “Concerns About Changes to the Refugee Determination System,” Canadian Council for Refugees, December 2012, https://ccrweb.ca/en/concerns-changes-refugee-determination-system. See also “Canada: Vote No on Migrant Detention Bill,” Human Rights Watch, March 16, 2012, https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/16/canada-vote-no-migrant-detention-bill.