The warm weather is finally arriving and with it, the question of what to do about refugees walking across the border.

The RCMP reported earlier this month that in January and February it had intercepted 3,000 people crossing from the U.S. to Canada to claim asylum. Compared to the same time last year — in the months following Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House — the number of migrants walking across the border has tripled.

Refugee lawyers and advocates have called for Canada to suspend its involvement with the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA). Because of its rules, the STCA incentivizes migrants seeking asylum to not claim at official ports of entry, such as official border stations.

The influx of people to Canada both predates and is a symptom of current American foreign policy. The Trump administration’s hostility toward migrants — whether it is expanding deportation or rescinding temporary protected status for more than 200,000 individuals — is influential.

However, there has long been a sizable migrant crisis; globally the number is 60 million people, including refugees and internally displaced people. Refugees make up at least one third of that group.

Grappling with this historic moment in the movement of people has had massive ramifications on countries around the world. Australia has chose outright xenophobia, imprisoning thousands of people on offshore islands. Germany has selected a pragmatic openness, opening its borders to more than 800,000 in 2014 — the largest acceptance rate by far in the EU.

Many countries, including Canada, have opted for some answer in between. For Canada, however, the problem has largely been one of geography. That is, it’s very hard to walk from Sudan to Canada. But the closures and heightened security around popular overland and overseas migrant routes are forcing us to contend with the ineffectiveness of the Canadian answer to the global migrant crisis.

The American problem — a president and an administration that is xenophobic and racist — means a solution must be more urgent.

Instead, we have been leading with bureaucracy, not vision.

In the last budget, the department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship was given $74 million to clear its massive backlog of cases.

A report by Robert Vineberg at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy attributes much of the existing backlog to an overreaction on the part of the government to a Supreme Court ruling. Vineberg argues the ruling was applied too widely to ensure everyone physically in Canada had the right to an in-person hearing. There is now at least a two-year delay for claimants to be heard by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB).

Vineberg suggests shifting the responsibility for hearing most asylum claims away from IRB and over to public servants within the immigration department. That would, he argues, create a more efficient system as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship has more office space and more staff.

It is a valid suggestion but it only adds to the list of technocratic solutions that have been put into place. Recently, the IRB changed its scheduling system to a first-in-first-out process. Nevertheless, the backlog persists.

For now, Canada has evaded the political strife arising from immigration that has rattled other countries. An Environics poll from March found that Canadians remained broadly supportive of immigration and refugees.

Whether that humanitarian attitude will remain is not a certainty, especially in Quebec where the province and municipalities near the border have asked the federal government for help in resettling migrants elsewhere across the country. I hope it does not devolve into the anti-migrant politics we’ve seen around the world.

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But hope is not vision. Canadian policy on migrants, especially refugees, has not responded to this moment in time. The immigration targets for the next two years represent less than 1 per cent of our population. Canada has coasted globally on an acceptance of immigrants that is nowhere near the scale of other nations.

Canada is back only if that includes doing our part in protecting some portion of the refugees in flight around the world. So many are going to come here anyway. The Canadian thing to do is to welcome them with open arms.

Vicky Mochama is a co-host of the podcast, Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a triweekly column for Star Metro News. is a co-host of the podcast, Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a triweekly column for Star Metro News.

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