Tuesday, August 10

Monday, August 9, 1999

Staff Sergeant Glen Rockwell, head of British Columbia's immigration unit, is frustrated in his role as an onlooker, and who can blame him? A boatload of smuggled Chinese nationals arrives off the B.C. coast, the 123 dehydrated occupants are fed and housed at the Esquimalt detention centre, they all claim refugee status and most of them are released into the community with money for accommodation and $175 a month for living expenses. They may stay; they may flee to the United States. Who knows? "I don't think they want to be refugees," he says.

This is the way the game is played these days. Section 7 of the Charter of Rights (the right to life, liberty and security of the person) applies to every person within Canada's borders; and the Supreme Court of Canada has decided, in the Auditor-General's 1997 paraphrase, "that any claim having a minimum credible basis for refugee status must be heard when the basis for it is seriously in doubt." Anyone who can reach Canada can claim to be a refugee and spend years putting down roots as appeal follows appeal.

Even when folks pay $57,000 each to be smuggled here from Fujian province in China, as these new arrivals did, their success in reaching the shore alive is un- blinkingly rewarded. Lucienne Robillard, who until last week's cabinet shuffle was Canada's immigration minister, dismissed all talk of holding these passengers responsible for the manner of their arrival. "We have to work against the traffickers," she said, "not people who are sometimes victims."

As word quickly circulates that the system is easily beaten -- that the grand adventure of making it to Canada without identification papers is a ticket to a better life -- smugglers are encouraged in their lucrative business and the smuggled are encouraged to climb aboard. Those whose business it is to make certain just whom Canada is letting across its borders and those who are assigned to put any number of hurdles in front of regular would-be immigrants can only marvel at what a porous system we have.

So it is with Staff Sgt. Rockwell. He watched one of the new arrivals on TV say (in the officer's paraphrase) that "he just wants to come here and make money." "That's not a refugee as far as I'm concerned," he reflected in a Globe interview last Thursday. "It doesn't make sense." And it won't, as long as the system tries to catch smugglers with one hand and beck- on to their customers with the other.