Wilf Cude, Moral Authority to Govern, contd.
commonplace as it was virulent: however, the helpless and desperate targets then were not Muslim refugees from Syria, they were Jewish refugees from Germany. (Are you paying attention, Mr. Levant?) According to the archives of the Canadian Jewish Congress, “of the more than eight hundred thousand Jews seeking refuge from the Third Reich in the years 1933-39 Canada admitted approximately four thousand.” Our Prime Minister from 1935 to 1948, William Lyon MacKenzie King, taking office as covert Nazi hostility towards Germany’s Jewish population slowly morphed towards the open brutality of Kristallnacht, tersely and infamously summed up his government’s attitude towards unwanted Jewish refugees with this repellent phrase: “none is too many.” That was government policy in 1939, when the German liner St. Louis streamed into Canadian waters with 908 Jewish refugees aboard fleeing the impending holocaust and requesting asylum: and we turned them away, denying them admission because they were deemed culturally unsuitable. Coldly, Frederick Charles Blair, our then Director of Immigration, pronounced official Liberal policy. “No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere.” Sound familiar? We drew one line back in 1939, condemning hundreds aboard that one ship to the camps in Dachau and Auschwitz, foreshadowing the holocaust still to come. Are we about to draw the same line again, with in all probability equally tragic consequences, as Ezra Levant would be pleased to have Prime Minister Trudeau do? However, we don’t have to do that, as our even more recent history indicates. Early in the summer of 1979, the newly-elected government of Progressive Conservative Joe Clark (at 39, our youngest ever Prime Minister, younger than Justin now) was confronted with the Vietnamese boat people fleeing the killing fields, prison camps and post-war chaos of communist-dominated Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Clark and Ron Atkey, his Minister of Immigration, were resolved not to repeat MacKenzie King’s appalling blunder: and over the short span of their minority government from 1979 to 1980, they managed to introduce and begin to settle some 60,000 Indochinese refugees. These were people from a variety of social classes, political backgrounds and religions, starting out from both urban and rural areas. The vast majority of them spoke neither English nor French, and very few had either relatives or friends in Canada. www.dialogue.ca
The entire process was completed in around eighteen months, at a time when our nation was struggling with economic uncertainty; and many of the newcomers ended up in places with no previously-established Indochinese communities. Clark and Atkey ramped up an existing private sponsorship program to great effect, so that finally while some 26,000 refugees were introduced by the government, over 34,000 were additionally introduced by private sponsors. Our country then was guided by politicians with the moral authority to govern. Rest assured, nobody need remind Justin Trudeau of that precedent: it has to be foremost in his thinking while he presses to bring those 25,000 Syrian refugees here as expediently as possible. As a teenager, he told his father a harsh joke about Joe Clark, and the elder Trudeau sternly rebuked him, insisting you don’t insult someone just because you disagree with that person’s views: and to drive the point home, Pierre marched his son off to the House and introduced him to Joe, who was then Opposition Leader. Some lessons are indelibly registered: and the lessons Joe Clark and Ron Atkey taught can resonate with us as well as Justin, when we work together to determine our nation’s proper course. Some reflective conservative thinkers thoroughly comprehend this, even though they don’t specifically cite the earlier moral zenith of their political predecessors. Commenting a day or so after the Paris atrocity, Christie Blatchford in the National Post began by sensibly observing “Canada should still keep open its doors to desperate Syrian refugees,” equally sensibly adding “I also wish that ordinary Muslims didn’t have to wear this latest outrage carried out in the name of their faith, though I expect they may.” Commenting almost a week after that same atrocity, Michael den Tandt also in the National Post opened with the most venturesome nonpartisan observation, “not everything Prime Minister Justin Trudeau does is wrong,” adding “in particular the Liberal government’s professed determination to help refugees from the Syrian war is absolutely right.” Leadership in this instance, he argues, “requires that people rise beyond first instincts and quick reactions, to apply reason and compassion, toughness and wisdom.” And he is bang on, and we should listen to him. To begin, we should put the issue of security when selecting refugees in proper perspective. Those being considered are already residents of camps administered by the UN, where they have been living quietly (and stoically enduring hardship) for years. Moreover, those given precedence fit the far safer categories suggested by retired general Rick Hillier: orphans, complete …/ VOL. 29 NO. 2, WINTER 2015-16
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