We can often judge a nation’s priorities not just by who said what in a key election debate, or how they said it, but by what was not said.

Monday night’s federal election debate — the only one in English with all candidates — was so insular that not only was a discussion on foreign policy absent, there wasn’t even one on how global geopolitics impact the nation.

At a time when the world faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis with 70 million people displaced worldwide due to war, persecution, climate change and the like, it’s astonishing that Canadian policies on asylum seekers were not a topic deemed worthy of debate, particularly since the parties have divergent views on it.

The word “refugee” did not come up once, not even in the section on polarization, human rights and immigration, among those vying to be leader of a country that holds an average of 7,000 people in detention centres every year, many in provincial jails.

Last Friday, dozens of people rallied outside the Immigration and Refugee Board in Toronto asking Canada to stop expanding immigration “holding centres” — de facto prisons — and escalating their security levels.

They were part of around 10 such rallies across the country, said Maya Menezes of No One is Illegal, which organized the protest in coalition with If Not Now, No More Silence and Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) Toronto. They rallied to support Montreal’s Solidarity Across Borders, whose protests have included blocking access to construction of a new detention centre in Laval, Que.

As long as there have been people on Earth, they have travelled — migrated — from place to place. Closed borders and the concept of criminalizing movement is a modern phenomenon, one that began to be more strictly imposed in Canada after the 9-11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001.

Yet, it appears, people who win a lottery by being born in, or moving to, a rich country like Canada self-righteously shut out others from opportunities out of unfounded fears of safety.

Are non-citizens worthy of respect? That is the question that should underscore Canadian policies on asylum seekers displaced by war and violence in their homelands.

Would we consider placing non-violent Canadians in maximum-security jails along with violent criminals as we ponder over whether they had broken the law?

Canada’s immigration authorities locked up nearly 1,500 non-violent detainees in maximum-security jails in 2018, an investigation by my colleague Brendan Kennedy found earlier this year.

Would we detain citizens in holding centres for weeks on end because the government hadn’t got its act together in processing our applications?

Are we supposed to feel relief that the number of asylum seekers sent to jails rather than detention centres has gone down from one in every three under the Conservative Harper government to one in five under the Trudeau Liberals?

These detentions can be indefinite, which in worst cases can extend to multiple years.

What are we the global, peace-loving do-gooders doing in reality?

“The domestic policies are completely out of sync with what we’re saying on the international stage,” said Menezes, pointing not only to the growing number of detainees but also Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quietly capping the number of Syrian refugees coming into the country and promising almost 10,000 new deportations this year.

Even deportation isn’t a simple act of buying asylum-seekers a one-way ticket. It’s a negotiation with the home country that first has to acknowledge the asylum seeker is a citizen. Given how bureaucracies work, this leaves the deportee in limbo.

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Menezes points to the political coup in Honduras in 2009 that Canada supported “to allow mining companies to have unfettered access to mines.”

“The largest group of displaced people in the migrant caravan infamously turned away at the U.S. border (last year) were Hondurans, who because they applied for asylum in the U.S. are now ineligible to apply for asylum to Canada,” she said.

They’re ineligible because Canada has a Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S, in which refugees who claim asylum in the U.S. cannot do so in Canada and vice-versa because they trust each other to be fair to refugee claimants.

Given the inhumane detention camps south of the border that have rapidly escalated under U.S. President Donald Trump, it’s time to get rid of that policy.

Only the NDP and the Greens have committed to doing so in their platforms. The Liberals want to keep the status quo.

“There are things that we very much disagree with obviously with what the Americans are doing,” Trudeau told me when he visited the Star last month. But the Liberals are not scrapping the policy. The “UN High Commission for refugees has made a determination that the U.S is still meeting the standards that we would expect as a safe country,” Trudeau said.

In July, the UN refugee agency also said the new U.S. rules on asylum seekers put vulnerable families at risk.

The Conservatives want tighter restrictions. The Third Safe Country Agreement applies to refugees seeking asylum at border-crossings on land and at airports. They want it to apply across the border at what are called irregular crossings. How they would police or enforce such a policy — a fence, a wall? — and how much it would cost is anybody’s guess.

“What people don’t know is that a lot of migrants and undocumented people pay into taxes — they just don’t get access to any of the services in the communities,” Menezes said. “A lot of people don’t get access to health care, a lot of people are exempt from labour law — especially migrant workers who already live precarious lives.

“The concept that they (migrants) are dangerous, that’s manufactured fear, that’s not real.”