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Alexander first appears in the paper trail in a March 17 letter and backgrounder to him from Tima Kurdi, little Alan’s aunt in Coquitlam. Fin Donnelly, the NDP’s Coquitlam – Port Moody MP, handed those documents directly to Alexander on March 24. The very first time Mohammad Kurdi and his family are brought to Alexander’s attention by name is in a sentence that also names Abdullah Kurdi and his family.

Without Alexander’s direct intervention under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the cases of both Mohammad’s family and Abdullah’s family were hopeless. They were doomed. Tima Kurdi knew it, and said so. But Alexander did not intervene. Much as it might upset certain Conservative partisans who would want the world to believe this has all been a put-up job engineered by Donnelly and a case of grave journalistic malpractice amounting to conspiracy, well, sorry. Even Alexander and Donnelly agree on the facts of the case.

Maybe it’s the scale of the Syrian refugee catastrophe that the federal party leaders would rather not level with us about. After all, it’s our votes they’re interested in, not our better natures. But one day bleeds into the next, and already nearly 3,000 Syrian refugees a day are making a run for the fences into Macedonia, then on through Serbia, headed for Germany or France or Sweden, anywhere.

The exodus is only now beginning. They are pouring out of the camps and the hovels where the elites of the NATO capitals wanted us to forget them, in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. There are four million of them. They have been driven mad from the waiting. For four years, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has been permitted to continue exterminating his people and bombing Syria’s ancient cities into oblivion. The refugees now know they can never go home again, and so they are on the move.