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Refugees as a long-term investment in the country


The man who oversaw selection of the 1979 Vietnamese refugees says new arrivals offer generational benefits for Canada

Thestar.com
Nov. 11, 2015
By Tim Harper

Immigration Minister John McCallum and the new Liberal government have drawn global attention and praise with a frantic Beat the Clock pledge to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of the year.

The deadline is probably unnecessarily tight and, to do it right, Canadians would probably give the new Trudeau government the breathing room needed to push the Jan. 1 deadline. But the government has the support of the UN Refugee Agency, provinces, cities, the military, airlines, labour organizations, churches and Canadians.

It evokes memories of the last time this country opened its arms in such a compassionate embrace and one Toronto man knows better than any the work involved in pulling off such a herculean task.

Scott Mullin was 22 and barely out of Carleton University when the Star headlined a March 5, 1979, piece about him - “Viet refugees view Canadian as a god.’’

A few months later, the CBC called him “The One-Man Board of Immigration,’’ in a July 1979 piece from reporter Peter Mansbridge.

Mullin, now the vice-president of community relations for the TD Bank, determined which of the so-called Vietnamese “boat people” came to Canada and which were denied passage, relying largely on gut impressions which resulted in far more “yays” than “nays.”

“We have to look upon this for ourselves as an investment in the future,’’ the young Mullin told Mansbridge 36 years ago. “The first six months we might have a lot of problems, but what’s this guy’s son going to be like and how’s he going to do? I think that’s the important thing you have to look at.’’

As he looks at the Liberal effort today, Mullin’s view has not changed. Just as in 1979, today’s Canada’s immigration officers must be given the latitude needed to their jobs, he says, and they would be looking at the potential of the family unit, not necessarily the parents, but the 14-year-old girl who learned to speak English while in a refugee camp.

“You look at it as a generational investment,’’ he says. “It’s not mom and dad. It’s the kids.’

As he looks back, he knows the first generation of Vietnamese Canadians he admitted did reasonably well.

“The next generation did extremely well.’’

Mullin was a key player in a proud - and ambitious - time in Canadian history. Over 24 months, 60,000 refugees arrived in Canada, more than half sponsored by private citizens. He worked around the clock from the Sham Shui Po refugee camp, running a full flight of refugees to Canada every two to three days, first using aging military planes, then chartering Canadian Pacific flights.

Then, as now, there were security concerns. Mullin’s political masters, the Joe Clark Progressive Conservative government, relied on him to screen out Communists.

Then, as now, there were health concerns. In the steamy, sweaty camps of Hong Kong, it was tuberculosis. Applicants had not only be non-contagious, but inactive, a tall order in those fetid surroundings.

Much of this Liberal plan seems modelled on the late 1990s airlift of Kosovar refugees under Jean Chrétien’s government when arrivals were housed on military bases then cleared here, which appears to be part of the 2015 plan. That airlift brought in 5,000 - one-fifth of the scope of this undertaking - and was spread over four summer months, May to August.

Mullin points to the shock of settling refugees in the middle of Canadian winter and the difficulty of securing planes during the Christmas rush as he calls the Liberal Syrian plan “ambitious.’’

“If it is happening in January or February, I think they could still check the box as a promise kept.’’

Thirty-six years ago, the Clark government got it right. The rewards for the country, and the participants, were immense.

Years later, Mullin was attending a Halifax event on behalf of the bank when he was approached by a man who read his name tag.

“Are you the Scott Mullin who was in Hong Kong?’’ the man asked him. When Mullin said he was, tears immediately rolled down the man’s cheeks.

“Others in the room wondered what I had just done to him,’’ Mullin joked.

But the man who had placed his family’s fate in Mullin’s hands now ran a company that employed 35 persons and he had one child at Harvard and another at the University of Toronto.

“I think this will prove to be, as the others have been, a very successful endeavour for this country,’’ Mullin says.