Refugees

By affirming universality in its immigration policy, Canada had taken a big step towards regularizing procedures. But in another area, that of refugees, there were no routine procedures. If there was a policy at all, it seemed one of non-commitment. As had been the case with displaced persons and Hungarian refugees, Canada’s response appeared ad hoc and self-serving. Certainly, in spite of a high-profile role at the United Nations and becoming a signatory to the 1951 United Nations convention on refugees in 1969, Canada had no domestic legislative commitment that would guarantee the country as a sanctuary for those in distress. Indeed, displaced persons and Hungarian refugees were understood as exceptional cases, not part of routine Canadian immigration activity.

Another such exception was demanded in 1968. The end of the Prague Spring sent a flood of refugees from Czechoslovakia streaming westward in what seemed a repeat of the Hungarian exodus a decade earlier. But this time there was no government stalling. Motivated by a mixture of humanitarianism, Cold War posturing, and economic concerns, Ottawa moved quickly to get its share of the newly homeless. With the Canadian economy on the upswing and a pool of well-educated and available immigrants to be acquired, teams of officials moved quickly. Perhaps having learned a lesson from the Hungarian episode, not even the usually cautious security service raised strong objections to the Czechoslovak resettlement scheme. In short order, authorities set aside regular immigration procedures in order to bring approximately 12,000 refugees into Canada.

The fortuitous mixture of altruism and self-interest that drove the Canadian rescue effort in the case of Czech and Slovak refugees did have limits, and like the refugee problem itself, they were political. Refugee advocates repeatedly attacked the government for favouring those from communist or other high-profile and unpopular regimes over victims of sometimes more repressive right-wing persecution. The charge was not without merit. For example, there seemed to be a glaring discrepancy between the government’s response to Ugandan Asian refugees expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 and Chilean fugitives from the right-wing coup d’état against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected left-wing government a year later. In the case of the approximately 50,000 Asians with British passports expelled from Uganda, British authorities, fearing a domestic backlash against a sudden influx of so many Asians, appealed to Canada and other countries for assistance. Canada responded in the affirmative. As the Czechoslovak resettlement program was being wound down, immigration authorities acted swiftly to admit about 5,600 Ugandan Asians who, it was judged, could do well in this country. Cabinet discussion of the Ugandan issue is still restricted information, but race appears to have played little or no part in the government’s decision to admit the Ugandan Asians – a far cry from what might have been the case a decade earlier.

The Ugandan resettlement stands in sharp contrast to the Chilean experience a year later. The Canadian government may have become colour-blind as to race, but it was not so with regard to political ideology. After the fall of Allende’s socialist government in an American-sponsored coup, Canada, protective of its investment in Chile, was among the first to recognize Augusto Pinochet’s military regime. The Pinochet government may have been friendly to new investment, but it was less sympathetic to those whom it had recently ousted from power. Arrests, “disappearances,” and political repression were the order of the day. But what Canadian officials regarded as an unfortunate, but distant domestic problem became a Canadian one when a small band of Chileans camped in the Canadian embassy in Santiago begging for political asylum. Ironically, Chilean authorities respected their right to sanctuary, while Canada did not. As embarrassed embassy officials scrambled to deal with their unwelcome guests, a vocal group in Canada coalesced under the umbrella of the Canadian Council of Churches and the academic community to pressure Ottawa into accepting significant numbers of Chileans who faced torture or imprisonment for their political views.

The contrast with Ugandan Asian refugees or the earlier Czechoslovak and Hungarian resettlement programs is unavoidable. The Chileans did not fare nearly so well. Perhaps uneasy about accepting any large group of potentially left-leaning immigrants or concerned about negative reaction from the American and Chilean governments, Canada proceeded with caution – too much caution in the eyes of some observers. Immigration authorities did not rush to process applications, and regulations were not waived. In fact, the very opposite occurred: in spite of continuing pressure from liberal groups, officials dragged their feet over opening an office in Santiago and proved unwilling to set aside stringent immigration procedures, including security checks. Two years after the fall of Allende and in the face of continuing international protests at the wholesale abuse of civil liberties by the Pinochet regime, fewer than 2,000 Chileans had been processed for entry into Canada. Many of those who were finally granted permission to come were well-educated white-collar professionals who otherwise might have been admitted as independent immigrants. This is not to argue that Chileans refugees were any more or less deserving of admission on humanitarian grounds than Ugandan Asians. But it does underscore the fact that there was more to Canadian policy than humanitarian concern. And if altruism might sometimes take second place to economic self-interest, political considerations might in turn override economic ones.

With an ever-increasing refugee problem worldwide and the end of one crisis seemingly the beginning of the next, Canadian authorities sought a responsible policy to replace the ad hoc response that had characterized the previous decades. In 1978, as part of the new Immigration Act introduced that year, Canada recognized refugees as a class distinct from other immigrants and legally entitled to sanctuary. In practical terms this policy meant that each year a percentage of a proposed total immigration goal was to be set aside for refugees and the cost of their integration to be covered by the government, although provision was also made for private groups to sponsor refugees.

In effect, two routes opened to them – an external one in which Canadian authorities processed individuals abroad, usually in camps, after they had been judged to be legitimate refugees and granted convention status, and an internal route by which people arrived in Canada and claimed to be refugees. The latter process required the government to create a system to determine the legitimacy of individual claims. The new Immigration Act’s refugee provisions were quickly put to the test during the crisis of the Vietnamese “boat people.”

The strength of the pro-refugee feeling in Canada, aroused by press and television reports of the fugitives’ plight, took the government and the public alike by surprise. Although the majority of Canadians may have harboured private doubts about the wisdom of the country’s accepting a large number of boat people, the demand for a generous response grew louder. Thousands of Canadians joined with friends, neighbours, and church groups in applying to sponsor Vietnamese refugees under the provisions of the new legislation. Again caught off guard, Ottawa responded with humanity. By the end of 1980 it had agreed to admit more than 60,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia under a combination of government and private sponsorship. Canada is distinguished by having the highest per capita resettlement program for these people of any country, with a major proportion of the refugees entering under private support. Since the crisis over the boat people, refugee admissions have continued to be an important and controversial part of Canada’s immigration program. In 1980 at the height of the crisis, the yearly estimate had to be revised when slightly more than 28 percent of all immigrants admitted to Canada were refugees. In the following decade, the percentage hovered between 14 and 20 percent.