Chris Selley: Liberals wrap much-needed refugee reform in a terrible privacy-invading package

Another commentary arguing C-2 asylum provisions are reasonable:

…This sure looks like an attempt to leverage Trumpian mayhem for the same purposes. It will and should be fought on those grounds.

It’s especially unfortunate because Bill C-2 also proposes to inject some relatively hardhearted sanity into our perennially out-of-control refugee system — changes that by rights would be debated on their own, without invoking Donald Trump’s name every 30 seconds, because these problems are not at all of the president’s making. For example, Bill C-2 proposes a one-year deadline for being in Canada, after which you won’t be able to apply for asylum, which is a clear response to the number of temporary residents trying to hang on in Canada using the refugee system. And it proposes expanding the Safe Third Country Agreement such that anyone crossing illegally from the U.S. would be ineligible to claim asylum, no matter how long they lie low upon arrival.

These are reasonable measures, completely in keeping with countries with far better human-rights records than Canada’s. Someone doesn’t just suddenly remember being persecuted after a year of not mentioning it. The principle of seeking asylum in the first technically safe country you arrive in may be unrealistic: no one willing to risk their lives for a better life in the United States or Canada is likely to settle on Mexico, considering the ordeals most refugees from Central America have already been through. But when a country like Canada accepts hundreds of refugee claims a year from the U.S and Europe, you know things have been taken to an extreme….

…Refugee advocates will argue, reasonably enough, that the solution for a self-styled humanitarian beacon like Canada would be to devote enough resources to the refugee-determination system such that we could adjudicate them quickly and efficiently. But no government ever, ever does that. We have a backlog of 280,825 asylum claims — roughly 0.7 per cent of the Canadian population.

Something has to give. And that something has absolutely nothing to do with Canadians’ IP addresses.

Source: Chris Selley: Liberals wrap much-needed refugee reform in a terrible privacy-invading package