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What to make of the case of Taha El Taha, an illegal who entered Canada through the back door of the now infamous unmanned border crossing in Quebec and discovered days later that he had terminal, stage-four cancer?

El Taha fled Beirut last year to seek asylum in the U.S. but crossed the border on foot from New York to Quebec in December.

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His story, while tragic, highlights the profoundly problematic nature of the Trudeau Liberal government’s open door policy toward refugee claimants.

While thousands of Canadians lie in beds in the hallways of their hospitals, and hundreds of thousands join long queues to see specialists, El Taha has had six chemotherapy sessions since January courtesy of the Canadian taxpayers to combat his colorectal cancer.

He’s now scheduled for emergency surgery.

And he’s pressing Canadian authorities to allow the family he left behind to join him. He talks with them every day on the phone.

The CBC — via its As It Happens radio program — has joined the heart-tug choir, lamenting that El Taha, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, is being denied the best therapy possible for his recovery, the diagnosis from his doctors being that he needs his family at his side.

So, this is where we are now, a little over a year after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted out his welcome to virtually any and all asylum seekers only a day after U.S. President Donald Trump issued his controversial travel ban to those wanting out of seven Muslim-dominated countries.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” Trudeau wrote on the social media platform. “Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada.”