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It takes a lot of nerve to stack the deck against some asylum-seekers and call them cheats when they lose.

It takes a lot of something else to stack the deck more by chucking asylum seekers in jail and telling them to go ahead, try building a case from there. In other democracies, refugee detention is like prison. In Canada, refugees actually are in prison. The minister of public safety can call an asylum seeker a “designated foreign national” if she doesn’t have the right papers and if he believes she travelled with a smuggled group. Sometimes the claimants don’t travel together. Sometimes everyone’s an asylum-seeker. But common usage is no impediment to bogus interpretations of the words “group” and “smuggler.” So for anywhere between two weeks and a year, such asylum-seekers as young as 16 sit in jail. It’s from there, with little legal counsel, little language support, little right for review and zero dignity, they must prove their refugee claims.

Having dug trenches along refugees’ paths to asylum, the government could at least respect all claimants’ right to appeal decisions made in an unfair system. But for many asylum-seekers, the government dug that up too. A horrified Federal Court reinstated it for “safe country” nationals this summer, but the government currently exercises its own right to appeal in the hopes of taking away refugees’.

So how should we speak of our country’s treatment of people who beg for protection from theirs? What word sits at the nexus of implacable meanness, self-serving ignorance and glib hypocrisy? Where in our language do shrewdness and stupidity converge? Truly, I don’t know. “Bogus” is a viciously incendiary label to slap on everyone who fails to receive sanctuary from persecution. But it seems far too polite a term to describe Canadian refugee policy.

Shannon Gormley is a Canadian journalist.