When an Iranian man and a Somali woman set themselves on fire in an Australian detention camp on a small Pacific island recently, Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was coldly pragmatic, urging his country to hold fast to its refusal of all uninvited refugees.

Australians “cannot be misty-eyed about this,” he said.

Likewise, when Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ruled Australia’s camp on its Manus Island is illegal and must close, his resolve persisted. Between PNG and the island nation of Nauru, Australia has diverted and detained more than 1,200 sea-borne migrants, leaving these asylum seekers in limbo, and Australians with a big problem.

So now, in an election campaign in which both main parties agree on the blanket rejection policy, politicians have been casting around for an international solution, a distant place to unload the wretched of Nauru and Manus, as if to say, “If we will not be misty-eyed, then who might?”

Enter Justin Trudeau, dewy-eyed heartthrob of geopolitics, who has been busy telegraphing his benevolence toward refugees since long before his election. As one Australian parliamentarian put it, he is the “obvious” choice.

Although Canada has met its goal of welcoming 25,000 Syrian refugees, Trudeau cannot claim to have saved as many as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has led the European response, or even Stefan Lofven, the prime minister of of Sweden, which has taken the most per capita. But the instant popularity of the Canada plan, despite no official confirmation, seems to suggest Australians are moved more by Trudeau’s reputation than his record.

It is as if the Canadian PM appears to Australians like the poet Emma Lazarus’s famous Mother of Exiles, better known as the Statue of Liberty, who urges the world’s ancient lands to keep their “storied pomp,” and instead to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…”

Margaret Perrott, a doctor who coordinates the Refugee Action Committee in Wollongong, south of Sydney, said she was moved to tears when she saw Trudeau standing in Toronto’s airport in December, welcoming refugees himself.

“I thought it was absolutely wonderful,” said Perrott, who lived in suburban Montreal as a child, so is well aware of the Trudeau brand. “I felt it would be nice to be a Canadian.”

This reputation — an extreme and specific version of the cloying, stereotypical niceness Canadians are saddled with when they go abroad — is why Trudeau leaped to the Australian mind, Perrott said. He offered a convenient way for Australia to dodge its moral duty and legal responsibility under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

“These people are playing politics, are they not? All of them,” she said.

But the very idea of that Canada would take Australia’s asylum seekers is “nonsense,” a “mean-minded” dodge of moral responsibility that suggests Australia is just trying to play a “naive” new prime minister for a “sucker,” said Colin Campbell, emeritus professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, and an expert in the comparative study of Australian and Canadian politics.

There may also be tactical domestic considerations at play. Shipping a few planeloads of refugees to Canada would address Australia’s current legal crisis in PNG, he said. “But is also would show that Canada has its limits. They’d only take 10,000 or something like that, (to which Australia could reply), ‘See? They’re just as stingy as we are!’ ”

“Australians are bloody pig-headed and just impossible in the area of refugees,” Campbell went on. “They would build a wall around the continent if they could. This is part of the history of Australia, it just makes you want to retch. This whole state was started as a penal colony. It’s been exclusive ever since.”

Oh, Canada, Canada, where there’s a naive prime minister.

The issue for Australian politicians then, is less about finding the refugees a new home in a nice socially democratic place like Canada, but in solving their own refugee crisis without actually letting them live in Australia. On this view, any country would do.

“I’m not sure of the degree to which the suggestion that Australia might approach Canada to resettle some of these asylum seekers is, then, specifically about Canada under Justin Trudeau, or more about a policy that mandates settlement other than in Australia,” said Benjamin Authers of the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, and a coordinator of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand.

Other countries have also been proposed, Authers noted. One of them is New Zealand, but Perrot is convinced that idea is a non-starter because it is seen as a foothold to Australia, just as many migrants in Europe go to France but really want to get to Britain.

Campbell was especially skeptical of idea that the U.S., particularly in this current election, would even be considered as an option. Canada, in comparison to almost all other nations, is an “easy mark,” he said.

“Germany’s under water with refugees, so it can’t be it. France has bombing here and there, it can’t be it. Oh, Canada, Canada, where there’s a naive prime minister,” Campbell said.

“I trust that Trudeau knows what is happening to him, and if not, he’s going to be told what is happening to him, and believe me, the High Commissioner in Canberra is well aware of Australian traits. Everyone in the diplomatic corps knows how they operate.”

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