The civil servant who helped run Canada’s last major refugee resettlement program has said that he’s concerned that politics is getting in the way of policy.
Gerry Van Kessel said that he’s frustrated by the game he feels the Liberal government is playing by constantly affixing and changing targets for their Syrian refugee program.
“There is an element of make believe in all this that keeps the focus on the make believe and not the substance,” he told a leading TV channel of Canda. “And to what purpose? That’s the thing — they are doing something that the public approves of. And yet the public focus is not going to be on what they are doing but on the manipulation around it.”
Van Kessel was the director general, refugees, for the immigration department when the Canadian government evacuated 5,000 Kosovars and fast-tracked the resettlement of more than 2,000 others over a period of several months in 1999.
Van Kessel said as soon as he, and other former immigration officials, saw the government’s Syrian plan, they knew bringing over more than three times that number of people in just four months couldn’t be done.
What’s happened since has been nothing but politics, he said.
“It became a political issue for them — nervousness around the fact that they are seeing they are not meeting their promise so they keep pretending they are meeting their promise,” he said.
In March, the Liberals had called for 25,000 Syrians to be brought to Canada. During the election campaign when refugee policy became an unexpected issue, they pledged that’s what they would do if elected — “immediately” their platform said and they would work with private sponsors to do even more.
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