Collacott Response to Poulton Critique

Abstract

The critic of my paper, Ronald Poulton, makes clear from the outset his commitment to a refugee determination system that leaves the door as open as possible to the free flow of asylum seekers through our borders. Canada has arguably one of the most generous refugee determination systems in the world in terms of the percentage of successful claimants and the number of asylum seekers we accept, as well as the number of refugees we resettle from abroad. In the circumstances, Poulton's claim that our treatment of foreign nationals is "anything but admirable" obviously misses the mark by a wide margin and is symptomatic of the off-repeated claims by refugee advocates and particularly lawyers that we are too harsh on asylum seekers as they try to get sympathy for their clients. As an example of such harsh treatment Poulton cites the case of his client, Manickavasagam Suresh, who was a fundraiser in Canada for the Tamil Tiger terrorist group. Poulton says that Suresh would have been sent back by the Canadian authorities to his native Sri Lanka where he would have been detained, tortured, and in all likelihood summarily executed had his removal order not been stayed by the courts. The facts regarding other Tamil cases, however, suggest otherwise. In January 2006, the Immigration and Refugee Board upheld an order to deport Sri Lankan Jeyaseelam Thuraisingam, a Tamil Tiger supporter and leader of a street gang in Toronto. In response to his lawyer's claim that he would be mistreated if sent back to Sri Lanka, the IRB noted that more than one hundred Sri Lankans had been sent back to their homeland and none had been mistreated as their lawyers claimed they would be. (1) Yet another area in which the critic provides an example of where he says our system is too harsh is the difficulty we place in the way of Roma from the Czech Republic trying to get to Canada to make refugee claims. In response to my point that no other member state would even consider a claim from a national of the Czech Republic--whether Roma or not--given that that state is a democracy and has a good human rights record and that no other country on earth but Canada grants refugee status to Czech nationals, the best Poulton can manage is to suggest that it is a credit to Canada that we alone have a system that can "cut through the fear of irrational hysteria" and grant refugee status to Roma from the Czech Republic. In response to this I would refer Poulton to the words of David Anderson, who served on the IRB before returning to politics and being appointed to the Cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. …