Canada's refugee policy becomes an election wedge issue

After 10 days in Iceland, far from mainstream politics, and particularly from Canadian politics, I come back and find that the Conservatives' campaign for this October' federal election has been well and truly derailed, and mainly by the unlikely issue of its Syrian refugee policy.
There seems to have been a belated collective outpouring of concern for the plight of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians, and a feeling that the Tories' grudging pledge to take 11,300 of them over three years is insufficient, hard-hearted and downright un-Canadian. There is a sudden hankering for the compassionate and outward-looking Canada of old, the Canada that took in 50,000 Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, and the Conservative government of Stephen Harper just does not fit that bill.
Interestingly, the reaction seems to have coalesced around one of those iconic media pictures, that of the body of three year-old Alan Kurdi, dead on a Turkish beach. In a German telephone interview, the boy's father, Abdullah, has put the blame squarely at Canada's door for rejecting the family's claim for asylum, although it actually appears that no such claim was ever made. Evidence is also coming to light that the boy's father may have been the driver of the capsized boat and working with the smugglers, and even that his actions may have been directly instrumental in the tragedy. As usual, the truth is never simple.
The problem has been compounded, or perhaps deliberately confused, by the Conservatives' wilful conflation of refugees and immigrants from other sources in their campaign speeches. When Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said recently, "We also are the most generous country to refugees in the world", he is guilty of this, as is Stephen Harper himself when he said, "Our country has the most generous immigration and refugee system in the world. We admit, per capita, more people than any other." However, terminology aside, this is also just plain wrong: the UNHCR ranks Canada not first, but tied for 41st place, in refugee intake per capita. Even in the case of total net immigration, Canada ranks a mediocre 24th.
But, whatever the impetus, and despite Harper's belated promises to expedite the asylum process and to expand Canada's commitment to 10,000 over the next three years (albeit largely through private organizations like church groups), the political damage has been done, and the Syrian refugee crisis has suddenly become the year's hot button issue.
Even little Iceland is not exempt from it. While we were there, reports surfaced of widespread disgust at the Icelandic government's pledge to take just 500 Syrian asylum-seekers, and a hurried Facebook campaign yielded over 11,000 families who are willing to open up their homes to Syrian refugees (some reports have put this figure at up to 15,000). Bear in mind that the total population of Iceland is about 330,000, about one-hundredth of Canada's population.
The problem is certainly a huge one, as a useful BBC summary of the refugee crisis shows. Some 350,000 refugees have physically entered Europe so far this year, and over 430,000 asylum applications have been received by European countries, by far the largest recipient being Germany, followed by Hungary, Turkey, and Sweden. Some 40,000 refugees are expected to arrive in Germany this weekend alone. The number of claims granted is, of course, much smaller, although Germany and Sweden are the largest asylum granters, with Sweden by far the largest recipient on a per capita basis. Germany is anticipating in the region of 800,000 claims over the entire course of 2015, and says that it may end up taking half a million of these.
The largest single country of origin for European asylum claims was Syria, although many hundreds of thousands are also fleeing their homelands from Afghanistan, Kosovo, Eritrea, Serbia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Russia. Over 2,300 have died making the treacherous crossing into Europe, mainly by sea though Greece, Italy and Spain. Of course, the situation closer to Syria is immeasurably more dire. Turkey has received a total of nearly 2 million asylum applications up to June this year, Lebanon over 1 million, and Jordan well over 600,000.
With all this as background, Canada's acceptance of 1,300 refugees over three years does indeed sound paltry (as does the USA's recent resettlement pledge of 10,000 over the next year). Given all the various sins that can be laid at Stephen Harper's door, it would be ironic if this was the issue that sank the Conservatives' ship in the upcoming election.