One of the two families that drowned last week trying to cross the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the U.S., through Akwesasne Mohawk territory, was Roma (often called by the pejorative term Gypsy) from Romania.
Roma constitute a large minority group in Romania and in several other central and east European countries, notably Hungary. They are the largest minority group in Hungary, at between three and four per cent of the population.
The couple who drowned, Florin and Cristina Zenaida Iordache, both in their 20s, had lived in Canada for about five years.
They decided to try to get into the U.S., with their two Canadian-born children aged one and two, when they were about to be deported back to Romania – a country where the Roma are de-facto second-class citizens, and where the couple had ample grounds to believe they would be subject to systematic discrimination in housing, employment and education.
The Iordaches’ efforts to gain refugee status in Canada had failed, and they had run out of all avenues of appeal. Canadian officials had bought plane tickets for them.
Desperate people will do desperate things. It is unlikely, however, the couple fully understood how dangerous it can be to surreptitiously cross the wide and turbulent St. Lawrence in March.
Harper Conservatives demonized the Roma
This tragedy will give Canadians who remember the massive public debates over Roma refugees during the Stephen Harper Conservative government’s time some very bad flashbacks.
This writer is one of those.
In 2011, together with Malcolm Hamilton and Jack Jedwab, I did a documentary film, commissioned by the multilingual OMNI television network, about the many European Roma who were seeking refuge in Canada, and the dire conditions of life for them in the countries they came from.
At that time relatively large numbers of Roma from a few central and east European countries were arriving each month at Canadian airports and asking for asylum.
These would-be refugees told Canadian authorities they faced persistent harassment in their home countries from police and other officials, who harboured centuries old prejudices against them.
Even worse, they said, were the threats – and acts – of violence from gangs of far-right hooligans. As a rule, the police were, at best, indifferent to anti-Roma attacks.
Canada’s last Conservative government was not too keen on these migrants from Europe. In fact, the immigration minister of the time, Jason Kenney, launched what amounted to a concerted propaganda campaign against them.
Kenney characterized the Roma as bogus refugees. He accused them of seeking entry to Canada not to flee danger and persecution but only to benefit from our country’s social and health benefits.
The star Conservative minister, who would later have a checkered career as premier of Alberta, argued that if the provinces would simply stop being so generous with these unwelcome migrants they would stop coming.
READ MORE: Hill Dispatches: Despite what Kenney says, the ‘Roma feel fear!’
The Harper government’s position was that such countries as Hungary and Slovakia were Western liberal-democracies, which guaranteed full rights to all of their citizens, just as we do here in Canada.
To discourage asylum seekers from these human-rights-loving places the Harper folks changed Canada’s refugee law.
They invented a new category called safe designated countries of origin. Asylum seekers from countries so designated would face high bureaucratic barriers. And it would be partisan politicians, not neutral officials or human rights experts, who had the sole discretion to decide which countries of origin were deemed to be safe.
This provision was similar to, but distinct from, the safe third country agreement with the U.S. The latter allows Canada to bar entry to asylum seekers arriving from the United States based on the notion, which many say is deeply flawed, that our southern neighbour is a safe haven for refugees.
More than a decade ago, the Harper government made sure officials at the agency charged with determining who qualifies as a refugee and who does not, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), got the message about its new designated countries list.
The rejection rate for Roma refugee claimants from Europe shot up in 2012. As a result, many Roma got discouraged and simply abandoned their claims.
Roma now more accepted
When the Trudeau team came to power in 2015 it brought with it a new, more open and accepting attitude toward refugees.
The Liberals got rid of the safe country of origin designation and treated all who sought refugee status on an equal legal footing.
The result: Canada started accepting the asylum claims of a large proportion of Roma refugee claimants.
The IRB publishes figures for refugees in the system each year . For 2022 those statistics show that we accepted 135 refugee claims from Hungary – most of which we can assume were from Roma – while rejecting none.
For Romanian claimants the picture was more mixed – 103 accepted, 45 rejected.
There could be many reasons for such rejections. The officials who rule on IRB refugee claims are not civil servants. They are political appointees.
There are still some IRB officials who were appointed during the Harper era, and IRB “judges”, as they are sometimes called, have great latitude. A certain measure of instinct and subjectivity inevitably enters into IRB decisions.
Politicians and activists who want Canada to maintain a tight and restrictive refugee system cite the lifeboat theory. Our Canadian lifeboat simply does not have the capacity, they say, to act as a haven for all of the world’s downtrodden and persecuted.
That argument ignores the fact that most of the world’s refugees are in countries close to conflict zones. There are hundreds of thousands of Syrians, for instance, in neighbouring Turkey and Jordan.
Canada is protected by its relative isolation and inaccessibility. Only a tiny trickle of the world’s refugees ever get to make a claim here.
Plus, there’s this: As of this past February, we in Canada had taken in over 130,000 Ukrainians fleeing the war in their county. We have admitted them under a specially-created program that allows them to bypass the normal refugee-determination process.
Lifeboat Canada does not seem quite so crowded and leaky when we are highly motivated.
Perhaps the tragedy of Akwesasne will give IRB officials who, in many instances, have something close to the power of life or death over fearful and anxious people, some pause.
If so, it will be too late for at least one family.
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