Chapter 12 Home, Hope, and a Human Approach to Displacement

Jim Gurnett

It is not popular to say, but a full, honest look at Canada’s record in relation to refugees can be disheartening. The defining words include superficial, simplistic, cosmetic, and self-congratulatory. We need to be more critical as we look at Canada’s real role in the global refugee catastrophe. We need to examine both our complicity in why there are so many people who lose the homes they want to have and our self-centeredness in how we act when we do allow a tiny number of those people to come to Canada. Canada’s approach to refugees needs to be anchored in human rights and not in public relations and political expediency, but the record shows a different picture. There is no shortage of literature about Canada as a shining beacon in responses to refugee misery, but a wider and deeper perspective is more disappointing. Without such an examination, Canada will miss the potential to be a true global leader, making a long-term difference for a more just and dignified world.

I sometimes lead workshops on political advocacy. As part of this training, I occasionally tell the following story as a reminder of the importance of perspective:

Once upon a time, there was a village located along the banks of a deep flowing river. Life was good there. The rain came when it was needed; the sun shone enough to offer many pleasant days. People had what they needed, lived in comfortable homes, and travelled along smooth streets to pleasant parks or shops where they received a friendly greeting as they stepped inside.

One day, children playing along the banks of the river noticed something in the water flowing past and realized it was a body, a human body. Their cries of alarm brought adults to join them. One brave young person quickly pulled off their boots, dove into the cold water, and struck out with strong strokes to swim toward the body. The swimmer grasped it and, with great effort, drew it back toward the bank, where several others waded out to help pull the body onto the grass. By now, an ambulance had arrived, and skilled EMTs took over. As the man who had been pulled from the water was loaded into the ambulance, he was breathing without assistance.

But he was badly injured and damaged from his time in the water. It was clear he would require a long convalescence in the hospital. Slowly, he began to heal.

As he lay in his bed, attended by able and caring helpers, a few days later, another citizen walking along a riverside path saw another body floating in midstream, and the same selfless courage by villagers saw this person too recovered, revived, and begin to heal.

It was not long before yet another body was seen in the current and rescued. And then another. And another.

Not wanting to see any life lost, the villagers purchased a boat and special equipment. They constructed a launch on the riverbank and set up towers with searchlights so they could keep watch during the hours of darkness. They organized a schedule so there were always some people assigned to keep watch and operate the rescue boat when needed. Everyone was proud to volunteer for their shifts at this important work.

Soon it became a challenge for the hospital to have space for the many survivors now resident there. A special tax was used to build a new facility especially for the recovering rescued people. Additional funds were used to hire specialists to offer a range of care services the survivors needed.

News media came from many other places to document the heartwarming and inspirational story of the commitment of the villagers to the well-being of the rescued people.

Some of the rescued people offered their deep gratitude in effusive words. Some healed enough that they could begin to participate in the life of the village.

But as more bodies kept appearing in the river, the challenge of it all became significant. Some citizens were getting tired of all the tasks related to the rescues and care. Rumours began to circulate about troublesome behaviour by some of them as they began to move about away from their special facility.

Finally, the mayor and council called a special public meeting to discuss the situation. Every seat in the auditorium was filled as the meeting was called to order. Speakers were passionate: some saying things had gone too far and it was time to let other villages downstream start doing more, others urging their neighbours to be even more caring and generous.

After some time, the mayor recognized a young student who had been carefully listening to the speeches. She stood and said, “What I wonder is why all these bodies keep coming down the river.”

There was silence in the room as people looked at one another in surprise.

The meeting changed focus in an instant, and soon a group was selected to travel upstream and look for an answer. Equipped with snacks and coffee, they set off.

At first, the road was good, straight, well-paved, and well-signed. But as they travelled farther, the road deteriorated, and after some time, they found themselves on a winding, bumpy track along the very edge of the now steep riverbank. And then disaster nearly struck, as they carefully navigated a sharp curve in the trail, now so near the bank that the outside tires dislodged pebbles that tumbled over the edge to the water far below. They stopped in time, but metres ahead, they could see where vehicle upon vehicle had lost its grip and fallen to the water.

After they had carefully backed away from this hazard and managed to turn their vehicle around, they began to explore the countryside. They came in time to a village and asked about what they had encountered.

“A wealthy man from a far city came here and has bought up most of the best land, and the excellent road we used to use to get our products to market runs through the land he now owns. He will not let anyone else use it, so he has a monopoly to move his own crops easily to the large city markets. Everyone else needs to take the track along the river and go by a long roundabout route. Many who have set off with their wares have never been heard of again,” they were told.

I feel privileged to have been able to meet, work with, and learn from people from many parts of the world who have had their homes of origin taken from them and are now in Canada. Some of my involvement has been in my work with immigrant-serving organizations, and some as a community member. I have met special people—friends—who have diverse lived experiences as refugees, and my life is better for their friendship.

Canada has received tremendous value from the hundreds of thousands of people who have come here over the decades, the people we call “refugees.”

I have an early memory of a boy in my elementary school class in the 1950s. Older children called him a DP (displaced person), and I needed my parents to explain that meant his parents had come to Canada at the end of the Second World War, a decade before, from Europe because of the damage to his homeland and that I was not to be one of those using those initials to taunt him.

The focus we most often encounter in relation to refugees is on the wonderful charity of Canada, generously giving these struggling people a home. Refugees are the object of the comment, but the subject is us, the good folks who offer the asylum, giving ourselves a self-congratulatory pat on the back for using a little of our excess to give them a chance.

There is a need to step back, shake our heads, and look at the issue of refugees with different eyes—eyes that have a human rights lens in place.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is clear that a home and citizenship are rights, as is access to asylum. There is no great merit in providing asylum—it is our human duty. Not to ensure our brothers and sisters have a home and citizenship is as much a violation of human rights as slavery. Failure to respond to those who have lost a home or citizenship is criminal, so responding is not something about which we should feel much pride. We are doing our duty as human beings and global citizens.

But, more importantly, it is the complicity of Canadians in the creation of refugees that has most troubled me over the years. This issue is seldom mentioned, but it is key to understanding the horror of the global refugee crisis.

How do any of us sleep undisturbed in our comfortable beds in a world with eighty million people who have been forced from their homes, a third of them officially qualifying as refugees? That scale of suffering should mean none of us can, at a minimum, avoid asking “Why?”

If we honestly and objectively sought an answer to that question, there would be public pressure for changes that would significantly reduce the number of people who lose their homes, and then the need to respond to those without homes would be dramatically decreased.

What displaces people from their homes? Aside from natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes, all the major reasons can be traced to human actions—war, poverty, climate change, or persecution due to one’s politics, religion, or gender. None of this seems to line up with the Universal Declaration’s assertion of “the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women” (UN General Assembly 1948).

Asking questions to peel back the layers around any war or major violation of the well-being of people leads to the ugly picture of someone else benefiting from what is going on. Sometimes, the path to that answer is long and convoluted, but eventually, the misery of some people is connected with the profits of some others. At the extreme end of this trail is the loss of home.

But, as in the story of the village along the river, most of us never think to ask “But why are the bodies floating down the river?”

We should have been persistent in asking this question long ago and considering the implications of the answers, but it is more urgent now than ever, as the crisis of human-related climate change creates more and more damage and may lead to more people losing their homes than all other causes. A new report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction says the danger is extreme, with the potential to turn much of the planet into an “uninhabitable hell for millions of people” (Yaghmaei 2020, 3), a guarantee of massive increases in the number of those who become refugees.

But facing the reality of how some people become refugees because of the pursuit of an affluent life by others invites a paraphrase of the quote attributed to Brazilian theologian and archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara about poverty. We might say, “When we talk about helping out with refugees coming to Canada, they call us saints. When we ask why there are refugees, they call us communists.”

There is no neutral ground in relation to refugees. We are surrounded by comforts and conveniences that connect to the abuse of the human rights of others and treatment that creates refugees. Whether it is a chocolate bar, a smart phone, affordable fashions, cheap gasoline, or good-paying jobs manufacturing equipment or providing services for governments waging war on some of their own people, the dots connect.

Millions of people have become refugees because of wars that can be traced back to the agendas of distant superpowers. Events of the past seventy-five years around the world as nations of the North have pursued their competition make the Great Game of the United Kingdom and Russia in the early nineteenth century seem quaint and modest. It is a moral failing to avoid recognizing this, living with heads buried in the sand about what is happening.

A good starting point for a healthier perspective on refugees (among other issues) would be to admit that we benefit from a global economy built on the abuse of power that depends on the oppression and displacement of other people in the pursuit of profit.

Every time I enjoy the pleasure of meeting someone who is creating a new home in Canada with courage and persistence, often in the face of discrimination and struggle, and listen to their story, I think in the back of my mind, “But why are you having to do this? By what right was the home you knew and loved torn from you?” And research, without fail, leads to a narrative that involves my own guilty exploiting of part of the world.

The choice to not do this honest research is a more dramatic example of the same approach we see regarding the persistence of food banks in our communities. Elected leaders are smiling in news stories as they drop off their bags of peanut butter and macaroni dinners during food drives and urge others to do the same. And we do, happily filling buses and bins with a little extra we have picked up at the supermarket while buying our own food, a good percentage of which we will waste. But year after decade, we fail to demand and leaders fail to enact public policy that will ensure food security—good and appropriate nutrition—for everyone.

So perhaps I should not be surprised that these same citizens and governments in the wealthy North prefer to promote sweet stories of people brought here to new welcoming communities where they are met at the airport with parkas and stuffed toys and to issue press releases bragging of bringing a few thousand, without any mention of the millions still in life-and-death peril and misery, rather than face the significance of why people become refugees and what can be done to stop this.

Setting aside our lack of attention to our complicity in the creation of refugees, Canadian leaders also lie without shame about Canada’s proud record in bringing refugees to start new lives here, loving to say we are number one in welcoming refugees per capita. Facts from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) refute that, putting us more around number forty-one (UNHCR 2015). Most refugees are living in countries near where they had their homes, so nations like Lebanon, Jordan, and Chad are, not surprisingly, far ahead of Canada in hosting refugees. But even at a distance, several European countries have higher per capita numbers than Canada.1

Most years, refugees barely account for 10 percent of the immigrants who become residents in Canada. We reserve the great majority of our immigration capacity for economic-class immigrants who will make a more immediate contribution to our own economic success.

I had a friend who had been homeless in Canada quite a bit over the years. He was a songwriter, and in one song, he had a line that said all that lies between “home” and “hope” are the letters “N” and “O.” M-N-O-P: no home, no hope.

Home is a little four-letter word, but it carries a wealth of meaning. It comes to English with an etymology that means “a place to lie down.” The context is ancient, long before hotels. If a traveller found themself at day’s end in a community away from home, there was an expectation that hospitality would be offered in some home. But there was also a danger that the hospitality might come from someone who had a connection that would require them to avenge some past deed of the visitor or their family to a member of their family. While the hospitality was good, there was a darker possibility too. And so the traveller would be wise to remain a bit alert as they rested, just in case. Maybe they would just lean against the wall, still holding their walking stick, dozing but ready to wake and react if trouble arose. Only when back in their own place could they let down their guard, lie down, and fully relax.

Greek mythology also captures some of the deep power of home in the role of Hestia, the eldest sister of Zeus. She was the deity associated with the hearth, the home fire, and was of such significance that she received the first offering. Her name derives from the image of a place to stay or dwell. The Greeks were not alone in placing great importance on keeping the sacred hearth fire burning. This priority in the physical world points to the importance at a more profound level of having a place on one’s own, where the fire is kept burning as the center of the circle of all aspects of human life and meaning.

To be responsible for letting the hearth fire go out carelessly was a serious crime. And only in the most extreme time of danger would there be a deliberate decision by the family or community to extinguish it.

This offers some sense of the deep damage that goes with losing a home. The loss of goods, land, wealth, memories, and relationships, often of health and family too, is not only evident from the outside in the painful journeying without resources, hungry and hurting. It is also deep in the soul and spirit of the refugee. Gone is that place where they can lie down, that place each of us depends on to give context and security to our lives. The mental and spiritual pain that may go with that can be as severe as any of the physical evidence, even if less easily seen. Scars that do not show are scars nonetheless.

During the years I was directly involved with a community organization providing settlement services to refugees, it was a source of anger to me how indifferent Canada was to the mental health realities of many of them. Government-sponsored refugees receive financial support for a bare-bones existence, generally based on the welfare rates of the province where they settle, for a year. Privately sponsored refugees may do better but still often live in poverty. Their finances might be adequate for a basement suite, (day-old) bread on the table, and thrift-shop clothing to maintain physical health. But there is no interest in responding to the deep injuries to their psychological well-being from the loss of their home hearth and the sufferings and abuse they experienced as they fled seeking safety.

This indifference to the mental health challenges has always been an issue but has become more significant in recent years, as many refugees coming to Canada have lived for longer years in conditions of terror and violence we can barely manage to hear described, let alone to have lived. Their sustained and horrifying experiences are triggers to a severity of complex mental health challenges, including post-traumatic stress syndrome. When these circumstances in their lives have been over an extended time and of a more awful manner, the consequences may be more profound than for people who have been able to spend a smaller time displaced before resettlement or who have had the resources to secure better interim shelter conditions.

But there are few sources of specialized mental health services for such people in Canada. Most of the funding for the mental health specialists at my organization a decade ago came from the UNCHR, since no order of government in Canada would consider it. Each year when I would submit our funding application, I would get a letter back from Geneva pointing out that the funding we were seeking was more than the government of Canada was contributing to its fund for refugee mental health and suggesting it was difficult to justify sending funding to Canada when there were huge needs for mental health services for refugees resident in countries that were far poorer than Canada. Fortunately, they did continue to provide some funding, but I shared their concern that the services we were offering in Edmonton reduced the resources available for services in other parts of the world, given the financial capacity of Canada to fund good services for refugees settled in our country.

Without good mental health services provided in a timely way, human and economic costs increase dramatically. Given the brief period refugees are provided with financial support before they are expected to be self-supporting, it is a prescription for trouble to be without the healing benefit of mental health services. For those struggling with significant mental health challenges, the possibility of focusing on successfully learning a new language or gaining skills for the Canadian labour market declines. Threats to family relationships may be increased, and physical health can suffer from not sleeping or eating well. People may deal with their challenges in their own ways, perhaps through self-medicating with alcohol or drugs, to be able to manage. At the extreme, people may be suicidal or aggressive toward others.

Of course, these mental health issues are not a characteristic of all refugees. Adverse circumstances are handled by people in a wide range of ways; many people are glad to finally have safety and freedom, and their settlement takes place smoothly. But Canada’s lack of acceptance that the experiences of becoming and being a refugee may lead to significant mental health challenges has meant that some have had a tough time. I think of one woman I watched for more than a year who walked day after day, head down, around and around a block by her downtown home, disconnected from everyone. Once we linked her with a health professional who understood the chronic PTSD of many refugees, she began to heal. But many others never had the opportunity she had to get such services.

One reason we were able to connect this woman with services was that we developed and operated a model of supported housing that was designed by taking time to ask refugees what sort of housing they would like to have, that would be useful to them as they sought to integrate into Canadian society. We did not decide what they needed. We listened to them.

What we heard was their desire for a place that was much like the natural life of many small communities in cultures around the world. They wanted some space that was secure and personal. They wanted the chance to connect with one another in a wide range of ways, offering care to struggling neighbours when that was needed, receiving care from neighbours when that was needed. They wanted a commons where they could come together to celebrate life events. They wanted to share in discussing issues affecting them and to participate in making decisions about them. They wanted children and elders to come together and learn from and encourage one another. They wanted to have access to professional services when they needed them, in a non-judgmental way.

When we were able to renovate a building and provide thirty-five apartments where people could live together in this context, much healing and progress happened in remarkable ways, with the refugee tenants themselves firmly in the driving seat. And the satisfaction that came from feeling in control, not abandoned or paternalized, further nourished that progress.

But this was not seen as fitting in the official definition of settlement and integration services, so finding the funding to sustain such housing was unsuccessful.

Now, a decade later, as I walk the streets and back alleys of Edmonton’s urban core, I encounter a new phenomenon—people who came as refugees and are now living rough, unhoused and unwell, struggling with addictions and in some cases dying alone in dark doorways or behind dumpsters.

The failure to address the mental health issues of refugees is just one aspect of what I describe as our public relations approach to refugees. We want good news stories that assure us we are doing wonderful things for these unfortunates. Politicians and the media are looking for those who open their own business a year after arrival or graduate first in their class from college. In Alberta, we celebrated in 2020 when Salma Lakhani, who came in 1977 as a stateless person after her family had its assets seized by Idi Amin in her homeland of Uganda, became the nineteenth lieutenant governor of the province. We have cabinet ministers, business leaders, and school principals in Canada who came as refugees. I am delighted this is the case. We are fortunate, and each of these people is a treasure and deserves sincere appreciation for all they are doing to make our country a great place to live. I am glad they were able to come here. And I am in awe of their ability to build new lives here with courage and persistence despite all the challenges they had to go through before and after getting here.

I know many people who have come to Canada as refugees are very happy to have been able to do this and are grateful to our government policies and investments in supporting refugees. And I am glad for them—and for all of us who become their new neighbours. But that does not mean we can be content.

The troubling issue for me is that when the narrative we have is made up of the stories of the refugees who have done well in Canada and who are thankful to be here, we are ignorant of the rest of the story, of all those who couldn’t come or who came but struggled. We fail to share their moments of deepest hurt, when they wish they had not come. We have a mythomania to present Canada and refugees in a feel-good way.

This permits the continuance of policies that are absurd. But few Canadians know about them.

The transportation loan program is one of these policies. These loans for overseas medical expenses and travel can add up to thousands of dollars, especially for a family with several children coming from a more distant part of the world. A moment’s consideration of this policy suggests it makes no sense. Here are people with great challenges to begin a new life—including learning a new language and all the complexities of a new culture, addressing all the recovery issues related to physical and mental trauma before arrival, and establishing a source of income to live on—and a day after their first year in Canada ends, they are also expected to begin to repay a loan, with interest, for their travel to come here.

Another is the requirements some need to meet for genetic testing to demonstrate family relationships. I have assisted people needing thousands of dollars for such tests when several children are involved, regardless of how much testimony there might be about the relationships. For refugees who have lost nearly everything meaningful or important in their lives, there is a special cruelty in making family reunifications more difficult. Family is often all a person has that matters.

The treatment of people who make their own refugee claims in Canada through the in-Canada asylum program is another area of policy shame. It often takes immense persistence and bravery to get to Canada as a refugee without having private or government sponsorship. The journey is long, convoluted, and fraught with dangers. Then, having arrived, once a claim for asylum is made, such people are pulled into complex procedural and legal mazes, with limited time or resources to support their claims before a hearing. Not surprisingly, less than half are believed and see their claims accepted. If they come from a country Canada has, in its own ways, decided is “safe,” they face even more barriers, and the government also has the power to designate anyone, for its own reasons, as needing mandatory detention.

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) between Canada and the United States is another deliberate obstacle created by the government—which likes to be honored for its concern for refugees—to impair the possibility of a person seeking asylum being successful. It prohibits a person from coming to Canada if they have already been in the United States and made an asylum claim, based on the premise that the person was already safe in the United States and so had no reason to come to Canada. After more than fifteen years in place, in July 2020, Canada’s Federal Court ruled the STCA is invalid because it infringes rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The 2020 Federal Court decision was overturned at the Federal Court of Appeal, and then, in June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled the agreement did not violate section 7 of the Charter but sent it back to review whether it might violate section 15. While these legal challenges move forward, the STCA was updated early in 2023 by the government to make it tougher, especially for asylum seekers and border crossings at irregular locations.

The STCA is part of the formal mechanisms to discourage people from trying to find safety in Canada. The more informal campaign by many politicians and news media to demonize people who seek to enter Canada in irregular ways to make a claim for asylum is another evidence of the darker side of our feelings about refugees. The persistent use of the word illegal to describe such efforts is the most evident aspect of this, since it creates an immediate sense such an action is criminal.

The fact is that Canada signed the UN Convention on Refugees (Canadian Council for Refugees 2009). A refugee claimant cannot be punished for the way they enter a country, and the law does not make it illegal to enter using informal border crossings. Yet loud voices demand that such people should be deported immediately without process or that their opportunity to make a claim should be narrower than it is for others.

The purpose of demonizing people who come to Canada to make a claim is to create a fiction of good and bad refugees. The good ones wait patiently in line until Canada brings them, either government-assisted or through a private sponsor. The bad ones come on their own and probably have no real claim. If Canadians can be kept preoccupied and upset by this fiction of fake refugee ne’er-do-wells, they are less likely to ask the more significant question of why we bring so very few refugees at all.

There are more people crossing borders to make refugee claims on a single day in nations near places of conflict and trouble than do so in Canada in a year.

For refugees who look less European, the deep systemic racism finally being discussed more openly in Canada creates another set of challenges and barriers for them.

We like to talk about being a multicultural nation, but we have a long way to go to understand what it means to be an intercultural nation, where we respect, integrate, and benefit from cultural perspectives and practices that are very different from the dominant one. Many of the refugees who do very well have had the benefit of involvement with Euro–North American culture before they came, perhaps from studying in the North or from involvement with people and enterprises from there. They come with some competencies to fit in.

But others, especially from rural areas, may have hardly heard of the world to which they come, let alone have any familiarity with how people think and behave here. Door locks, clocks, thermostats, water taps, ovens, and windows are a few of the things that are entirely foreign to them.

Because I lived there for a few years, I have had a special interest in those who have come over the past four decades from Afghanistan. Many who came in the early 1980s were highly educated, perhaps well-travelled, largely urban people, often from families that were affluent or influential there. In no way do I downplay the hurt and loss they suffered as they escaped for their lives and began to build new ones here, aware they may never see family or home again. But they had some capacity to undertake that huge new challenge. Those who came twenty years later had more often been subsistence farmers or from small villages in central provinces; had never visited Kabul, let alone stepped on an airplane and flown halfway around the world; were members of ethnic groups that experienced discrimination even in Afghanistan; had never been to school; and were without any labour market skills remotely like what would be needed in Canada for decent employment. And they had lived through a generation of war and terror, already deeply traumatized by it.

Our public policy has given little attention to understanding the range of people who are refugees and developing programs or services that are sensitive to that diversity. When it has been politically expedient to act with some generosity in welcoming refugees, we have done it with a dramatic flair. Instead of a generous and consistent commitment to make Canada home to people displaced from their homes in many locations around the world over the decades, we have a series of dramatic vignettes—Hungarians in 1956, Czechs a decade or so later, the Ismaili Muslims from Uganda soon after, the “boat people” as the 1980s arrived, Bosnians and Kosovars in the 1990s, and the most recent welcoming of twenty-five thousand Syrians. These all provide material for stories that generate more positive emotions about our actions than real concern for the full ugly story of refugees’ lives.

Perhaps that approach should not surprise us too much. For a century, we participated in the United Kingdom’s “home children” program, bringing more than one hundred thousand children who frequently were mistreated or taken advantage of. Yet several years ago, Jason Kenney, recently premier of Alberta but at the time minister of immigration, said that there was nothing to apologize for. And we have persisted in making huge use of temporary work visas to provide Canadian businesses with cheap labour without having to actually increase immigration to the level we should, giving people a real chance to settle and become members of communities in Canada. Why would we want a generous and consistent plan to make a substantial ongoing contribution to the safety and future of refugees?

To approach our own actions and attitudes—or our public policies—with the justice and compassion that express a commitment to human rights requires us to see that we are neither more nor less than siblings in the human family. A line in one of the documents from the Second Vatican Council says, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties, of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, those too are the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties, of [each of us]. Indeed nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts” (Catholic Sensibility 2006).

My disappointment as a Canadian looking at the story of our nation’s actions in relation to refugees is that we have not met this standard. For many of us, ignorance of the facts may be the reason. For others, it is greed or political expediency. We could do so much better. Our failure makes the world a poorer place.

I look for the day when Canadians will join to say with open arms to those who have had their homes of origin taken away, “You don’t have to earn a place here. You don’t have to bargain or beg for it. You are worthy.” A home nourishes the hope that gives energy for facing the next day and its challenges. A determination that human rights will be more than a warm sentiment, but will be a guiding reality for daily life, for individuals and governments, is the tool that can make that true for many now denied it.

It’s past time for Canadians to look upriver and ask “Why?”