Many times during the years-long debate over what to do about Roxham Road — and more so since the surprise announcement of a deal between Ottawa and Washington to effectively “close” the illegal border crossing between New York and Quebec — many learned voices have warned that Canada can’t realistically hope to avoid the practical or moral challenges of global migration. Geography shelters us far more than most countries, with vast ocean crossings on three sides. But people will go to astonishing lengths in search of a better life. To close the illegal but safe and orderly crossing at Roxham Road, many warned, would be to invite much riskier and potentially tragic voyages, and to enrich the human smugglers who facilitate them.
When news broke Friday night that Akwesasne police were fishing corpses out of the St. Lawrence River, including at least one child who was a Canadian citizen, my first thought was that this warning had come true even more quickly and horrifyingly than anyone predicted: Not even a week after Canada and the United States announced “irregular” crossers would be turned back to the other country — effective immediately, to avoid a last-minute rush — two families had decided to get around the problem by water. A local man known by locals to be in the smuggling business was allegedly happy to help, in a tiny boat on a stormy night, with predictable consequences.
The death toll now stands at eight, including two Canadian-citizen children of a Romanian father, Florin Iordache, who was facing deportation from Canada, CBC News reports. As it stands, it’s much less of a scandal than I expected it to be on Friday.
One major reason, judging from social-media discussions I’ve seen: The victims of this tragedy were headed south, not north. And there’s no evidence the newly renegotiated Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which “closed Roxham Road,” had anything to do with it: The alleged Akwesasne smuggler, who is still missing at time of writing, had made several such trips before, according to clearly unimpressed locals.
Still, if a Conservative government had made that deal with Washington to close Roxham Road, it’s safe to say the Liberals would right now be accusing the prime minister (at least) of manslaughter. It wasn’t Stephen Harper’s fault that two-year-old Alan Kurdi drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015, but you wouldn’t really know it reading or watching the news of the day. A Toronto Star columnist captured the mood perfectly in a sentence: “Are we no longer the compassionate and welcoming country we once were?” The Kurdi family’s futile attempts to join family members in Canada, and Harper’s perceived disinterest in Syrian refugees, became a huge liability for a dying government.
There are significant differences between the Kurdis and the Iordaches, of course. The Iordaches weren’t fleeing a civil war; rather they were fleeing, in effect, Romania. But of course, the Kurdi family had already fled Syria. Their fatal passage was from the coast of Turkey to a nearby Greek island. In both cases, it seems, the families decided safety wasn’t good enough for their kids. They wanted to give them the best life they could manage.
As different as the two families’ situations were, I suspect that if we had photographs of the Iordache children dead in the St. Lawrence, as we did of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, this would be an absolute nightmare for Justin Trudeau’s government.
There’s another major difference, after all, and this one ought to be aggravating rather than mitigating: The Iordache children were Canadian citizens. They were born, presumably, during the endless months it takes this country to adjudicate an asylum claim: officially two years for initial claims and a year for appeals, but in many cases much longer.
Canada needn’t apologize for defending its borders. It’s not “Canada’s fault” that these terrible decisions were made on the shore of the St. Lawrence River. But at the very least, surely it’s worth a ponder: What does citizenship mean if it conveys no practical means of entering the country? Not granting those children citizenship at birth wouldn’t have helped, in this case. But birthright citizenship, combined with the glacial pace of asylum claims, is a powerful incentive to people with dubious or no-hope asylum claims to give Canada a try anyway: Worst-case scenario is your kids can move here when they’re older.
Or rather, that’s the second-worst case scenario.
Also very much worth pondering: Assuming Roxham Road is as “closed” as they say — and I have my doubts — Ottawa and Washington have effectively teamed up to goose the human-smuggling market, with all the dangers that come with it. What, if anything, are we going to do about it? At the very least, I think, Ottawa needs to emphasize and advertise that the STCA now applies at inland waterway border crossings as well as on land. I suspect human smugglers with boats won’t be hugely forthcoming on that front.
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