Canadian media divided on Tamil refugee question

Editorials get nasty as new poll finds most Canadians want refugee ship sent back

A recent poll of attitudes towards the 492 Tamil migrants who arrived in BC by boat two weeks ago found that 63 per cent of Canadians feel the ship should have been turned back before it reached Canada, bucking the trend of our traditionally welcoming views towards immigrants.

The National Post’s Adrian McNair believes it’s the economic burden the migrants represent that’s at the heart of our objections. The “sheer number of refugees has overwhelmed the system,” he says, noting BC’s Legal Services Society usually helps 700 refugees over the course of a year. Add to that the price of health care and welfare, and you get “an exorbitant cost” Canadians are unwilling to pay.

The Toronto Star’s Angelo Persichilli is blaming “politicians and activists who, with the help of the media, radicalize the debate” by making blanket declarations about the migrants being either terrorists or saints. Such statements “block a real debate” by “raising false concerns and hiding the real ones” and have whipped up sentiment against the migrants.

Among the polarized voices to which Persichilli is referring are likely the editors of Postmedia and Sun Media, who’ve engaged in a heated war of words in recent days. The Toronto Sun has been firing on all cylinders, printing a series of columns describing Tamils as “Queue-jumpers, scam artists, back-door invaders, and … terrorists.”

Surely the Toronto Sun’s Ezra Levant is exaggerating when he describes his ideological opponents as “bleeding heart politicians and fashionable journalists who don’t believe Canada should have any borders at all.” As any Canadian liberal knows, with no borders, there would be no way to keep American tea-partyers out of the country.

An editorial in the National Post calls Sun Media’s views “odious” and suggests that the real threat to our immigration system is not a boatload of Tamils, but the thousands of annual refugee claimants from Hungary, 99.5 per cent of whom are rejected. A full member of the EU, Hungary is the single largest source of refugee claimants to Canada. It’s “illogical to focus ire on Sri Lankan refugee claimants” while ignoring Hungarians’ abuse of the system.