Migrants and queue-jumpers and smugglers, oh my!

The federal government announced proposed legislation yesterday that it says will stop human smuggling. Not everyone's convinced it will work.

Since the MV Sun Sea deposited 492 Tamil migrants on the shores of B.C. this summer the government has been promising reforms to Canada’s immigration system. They delivered yesterday, when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stood in front of a docked human smuggling ship and announced legislation that targets the ringleaders of migrant operations and allows the government to treat refugee claimants who are part of an ‘irregular arrival’ differently than those who come by normal routes.

Something about the bill smells fishy according to The Province, especially because it was “announced at a photo op in such a rawly political manner.” Particularly worrying is that the ‘irregular arrival’ clause appears to create “second-class refugees out of people who arrive en masse,” and the paper speculates the law was ill-thought out and “thrown together in a few weeks … to (make the Conservatives) appear 'tough on crime' before an election by creating new scapegoats.”

The National Post’s John Ivison says that Toews “might as well have set a chair in the Pacific Ocean as the tide came in and ordered that the waves go no further” than expect this legislation to stop human smuggling. The problem is that it only addresses big events like the Sun Sea arrival, but by some estimates up to 90 per cent of refugee claimants arriving at Canada’s airports are aided by smugglers somewhere along the way.

The Post’s Keith Beardsley says the proposed measures “will be effective as long as the ringleaders are stupid enough to actually travel on a boat with their human cargo,” which they probably won’t. Another possibility is the laws may cause smugglers to simply drop their passengers in lifeboats at our maritime border and turn back, greatly increasing the risk to passengers who might be legitimate refugees. Maybe it’s because Beardsley is a former aide to Stephen Harper and is unwilling to criticize his former boss, but while he spends most of the piece enumerating the bill’s flaws he concludes by warning the opposition parties not to dismiss it. Old habits die hard, apparently.