The refugee issue has long simmered beneath the surface of Canadian politics. It was there when former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government passed the infamous Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, a thinly-disguised attack on Muslims.It was there when Conservative leadership contender Kellie Leitch called for immigrants to take a so-called Canadian values test.In 2016, Canadians congratulated themselves on their generosity after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government admitted thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing civil war.Yet even then, an Angus Reid poll showed that 44 per cent of Canadians opposed the move.Now refugee policy is back in the forefront. Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford has accused the Trudeau government of encouraging “illegal border crossers” to enter Canada and claim refugee status.Ottawa’s actions, Ford’s office says, are creating a housing crisis in Ontario and threatening “the services that Ontario families depend on.”The Ontario government, it says, will no longer support these asylum seekers.Ottawa must pick up “100 per cent of the bills.”Toronto Mayor John Tory has warned that refugee claimants making their way into Ontario now occupy more than 40 per cent of the city’s available shelter space.For his part, Trudeau has used the refugee issue to burnish his progressive credentials.He has, in effect, dismissed Ford as a know-nothing, saying that the premier doesn’t understand how the refugee system works.On CBC Radio Friday, the prime minister blamed unnamed conservative politicians at home and abroad for trying to create divisions within society over the refugee issue.You can bet that Trudeau is teeing up for the next election campaign during which the Liberals will try to present the Conservatives as anti-immigrant troglodytes in the thrall of Harper, Ford and U.S. President Donald Trump.Yet at the crux o ...
|
