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This is not to suggest that Canada’s plan to dismiss refugee claims from single men (who will still be accepted as privately sponsored refugees) isn’t a prudent one in terms of “minimiz[ing] security risks,” as the government states in its plan. It is. Though at the same time, it’s a pretty glaring admission of the fickle faith the Canadian government has in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ pre-screening process. But Canada’s plan is also an imperfect one — one that assumes that the greatest threat to our security has or will come by way of single men, which is not always true, and one that undermines the notion that the lives of all Syrian refugees matter equally, which is at once invalidated by Canada’s plan to leave single male claimants languishing in refugee camps.

Defenders of this policy will say it’s all about eliminating risk, which is fair. With just weeks to go until the end of the year and the Trudeau government sticking loosely to its commitment to bring over 25,000 refugees (it now says it will settle 10,000 refugees by the end of 2015 and another 15,000 by the end of February, though all refugees will be identified by December 31), Canada has to expedite the process somewhere, and disqualifying those belonging to the group that poses the highest security concern is probably the most efficient way to do so. Though by that logic, Canada would also be justified in limiting its pool of refugees to only those of Christian background, considering that Muslim refugees belong to a group that has been shown to pose the higher security threat.