Life in Canada

That the federal government will miss its self-imposed, once-revised, entirely arbitrary end-of-year deadline of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees is no extraordinary revelation: an incumbent government would have had difficulty relocating that many people in such a relatively short amount of time, to say nothing of one hobbled by the bureaucratic challenges of only having been in office for eight weeks.
Still, up until the last week of November, the Liberals remained defiantly committed to their plainly unfeasible pledge to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end, relying ostensibly on power of positive thinking and other mantras to which the public was not privy. Then, Immigration Minister John McCallum conceded that the initial target might have been a bit too ambitious, and he announced in a press conference that the goal would be revised to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end, and another 15,000 by the end of February.
That was then. This is now: on Wednesday McCallum, said that Ottawa might fall short of reaching that revised target, attributing the delay to factors including weather complications and the variability of “human nature.” Though Canada likely wouldn’t see 10,000 refugees by Dec. 31, McCallum said, he was still confident that it would bring in a total of 25,000 people by the end of February. As of December 21, 1,869 Syrian refugees had landed in Canada.

Predictably, this shifting of the goalposts has provoked chiding from Conservative benches, but the fault here isn’t that the Liberals broke another promise, or that they couldn’t make their expedited mass migration plan happen. Rather, it’s that the government insists on setting such silly, quixotic targets in the first place, with seemingly little regard for feasibility, associated costs or reception from ordinary Canadians.
Indeed, there’s a burgeoning optics problem here. What Canadians have heard from the government over the last couple of months is a fixation on a target number of refugees arriving in Canada by a certain time. What they’re reading, however, is that the government is expected to spend $61 million to $77 million on hotel stays for new refugees, and that it will reimburse up to $61 per day per refugee for hotel meals. For the average Canadian — who, according to Statistics Canada, spent roughly $22 per household per day on food in 2013 — those figures are astonishingly inflated. Canadians are thus left to wonder what the costs might have been had the government not been so preoccupied by its wholly arbitrary deadline, and instead tried to balance the need for expediency with the responsibility to control ballooning expenses. Surely, in that aspirational case, $15 hotel breakfasts would not have been part of the plan.
The fixation on numbers and deadlines also seems to overlook the fact that moving refugees is not quite the same as shipping crude oil: refugees have personal belongings, assets, friends, families they have to leave behind behind. They have legitimate, very human reservations about moving to a place they know little about, and hold out hope — however baseless — that the fighting in Syria will soon end and they’ll be able to return home. That is why it was also no extraordinary revelation that only 6.3 per cent of refugees contacted by the United Nations in late November said they were interested in coming to Canada, especially when, according to CBC News, some refugees have only been given two or three days notice before being shipped to a totally foreign land.

Canada might have wanted to welcome 25,000, then 10,000, Syrian refugees by year’s end, but Ottawa quickly realized that refugees aren’t mere hapless entities — especially not those who are actually able to escape the fighting and make it to a refugee camp. They can’t be expected to move at will to fulfil a campaign promise 10,000 kilometres away.
It doesn’t matter that the Liberals are breaking another promise: it matters that they’re latching themselves to these dumb promises in the first place, and that they then refuse to concede their impracticality. The same stubbornness is playing out with the Liberals’ pledge to withdraw Canada’s CF-18 fighter jets from Syria and Iraq, which the Canadian government stands by, for now, for a reason that still isn’t entirely clear, other than that it was a campaign promise. Eventually though, team Trudeau will have to acknowledge that campaign promises don’t always make for the best policies. That, or it will have to start writing its targets in pencil instead of pen and shelling out for overpriced hotel meals.