[URBAN NOTE] "Why the Tories’ mean-spirited refugee policy has awoken urban Canada"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc describes yet another failure of the Conservative government, just short of a month away from the elections.

Like many Canadians, I was riveted to the point of distraction by the extremely disturbing events of last week, and the way the developments in Europe’s refugee crisis reverberated in this city, and in other big cities across the country.

But beyond the emotion of that terrible image of a young boy washed up on beach, the accounts of the chaos in Budapest, and the Canadian government’s tin-ear response to the same, something else gnawed at me relentlessly, almost like a trigger. And on Saturday, as the migrants who’d been treated so wretchedly in Budapest finally reached the safety and open arms of officials in Austria and Germany, the source of the aggravation hit me:

That as the events of the past week unfolded, Canada, in a peculiar way, suddenly found itself on the same ethical plane as Hungary — a self-involved country with an odious government and a rich history of treacherous xenophobia.

True, we haven’t forced weary families off trains. But in the worst humanitarian crisis in decades, it suddenly became crystal clear that we hadn’t done much better than the Hungarians, and that grim fact sunk in powerfully last week.

We caught the image of Harper’s Canada in the mirror, and we didn’t like what we saw there.