Harper holds to party line on admitting Syrian, Iraqi refugees

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper discounts meeting with other party leaders to discuss refugee crisis, holds to 10,000 more admissions from Syria, Iraq in next three years.

Thestar.com
Sept. 7, 2015
By Tonda MacCharles

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says his political rivals are “simply not up to” making the tough national-security decisions required of a prime minister.

The jabs at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair came just hours after Harper deflected growing calls by premiers, mayors and his political rivals for swifter action on the admission of Syrian refugees.

At an early evening rally in Mississauga on Monday, Harper told a couple of hundred partisan supporters that there is “no more difficult decision for a government, for a prime minister, for a member of parliament ... than voting to put the lives of our young men and women in uniform at risk in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. But these are the decisions in the world we’re living in that you have to be able to make.

“Our opponents are simply not up to it. Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau will not even call jihadist terrorism what it is. But if you cannot call jihadist terrorism by its name then you cannot be trusted to confront it and you cannot keep Canadians safe from it.”

The harsh political attack came just hours after Harper had shrugged off a letter by Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who with New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair has asked Harper for political leaders to meet to deal with the migrant crisis.

“Well, look, we’re not going to get into partisan games on this,” said Harper at an earlier campaign event in Scarborough.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper deflected growing calls from premiers, mayors and his political rivals for swifter action on admitting Syrian refugees to Canada.

He said three times on Monday that the government is “already” acting to bring in more refugees from the area and is now looking at ways to expedite admissions.

But Harper has come under mounting pressure to act now, with mayors in Calgary and Toronto joining premiers in Manitoba and Quebec saying their cities and provinces are ready to help take in more Syrians.

Asked about Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard’s suggestion on Monday that his government would increase Quebec’s admissions of Syrian refugees by another 2,500 people, Harper appeared to suggest that the number is already factored into the Conservative Party’s electoral promise to resettle another 10,000 refugees from both Syria and Iraq over the next three years.

In French, Harper said 2,500 represents the Quebec proportion of new refugees “we have already promised.” He added, “We are examining how we can speed up this process.”

However, Harper stressed that any admissions would be viewed through a security lens, signalling that the Conservative Party does not see a need to adjust its message despite an outpouring of public sympathy towards the thousands pictured fleeing violence in Syria.

Harper defended his policy of prioritizing persecuted ethnic and religious minorities for admission, saying he wanted to reassure Canadians that “we make sure we help the most vulnerable first. This is not first come, first served.”

Harper has said the “root cause” of the crisis is the expansion of the brutally violent Islamic State group (also know as ISIL or ISIS), which has rapidly spread across Syria and Iraq.

He was asked what Canada was doing to address what many observers say is the real reason so many millions have fled Syria: the civil war and devastation wrought by Syria’s dictatorial regime of Bashar Assad.

“Canada has long said that Mr. Assad needs to go,” Harper responded.

But he held to his stance that with 15 million refugees “in Iraq and Syria alone,” his government’s approach of “taking action” on refugees, delivering humanitarian aid to the region, and “taking military action, particularly to deal with ISIL, with ISIS, which is a serious problem in both Syria and Iraq” was the only reasonable way to approach the crisis.

Trudeau, meanwhile, is continuing his efforts to bring party leaders together to discuss Canada’s response to the crisis.

On Monday, he said the scope of the humanitarian emergency means that the politicians cannot wait until after election day to talk about the issue.

“The major parties should be able to sit down together and talk about what we can do right now that goes beyond partisanship and talk about Canadians responding better to this crisis,” Trudeau said during a campaign stop in Mississauga.

He noted that the crisis has touched millions of people around the globe and prompted an outpouring of support from Canadians and provincial governments.

“There is a will in Canada to do more,” Trudeau said.