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Rather than screen at least some of them for health and security concerns in Canada, they will now all be screened overseas. And while the Liberal platform put the cost of the program at $250 million, it now admits it will cost as much as $678 million (not counting the costs to private sponsors). Still, aside from the number of refugees, the schedule on which they’ll be brought in, the process by which they’ll be screened, how much it will cost and who will be paying for it, it’s pretty much the same plan.

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It would be churlish to demand that the Liberals stick to their original promise, now that they have been persuaded the promise was unworkable. True, the promise was a key part of the party’s effort to persuade voters that they, and not the New Democrats, were the party of “change,” offered up at a critical moment in the campaign on an issue that was at the time dominant. That they have now, weeks after vanquishing the NDP, effectively delivered on the NDP promise — 10,000 refugees by the end of the year — may be counted as one of life’s little ironies, especially if you are not a New Democrat.

But there is no reason to suspect — or at any rate no evidence to prove — that the promise was made in bad faith. The Liberals can plausibly claim that, at the time they made it, they had no idea what it would cost or how they would deliver on it. It wasn’t dishonest, just spectacularly uninformed. That it was a promise they should never have made is now at least tacitly acknowledged; that original error would not be remedied, but compounded, by insisting they follow through on it.