The Prime Minister gives Mexico the It’s-Not-You-It’s-Me treatment.

“This is not the fault of the government of Mexico – let me be very clear about this,” Mr. Harper told reporters, explaining his mid-July decision to clamp down on soaring bogus refugee claims from Mexico by requiring Mexicans to obtain visas before entering Canada. “This is a problem in Canadian refugee law which encourages bogus claims.”

A couple of days’ worth of headlines…

Tories ‘prepared to defend’ polygamy ban

Toews supports new crime rate measure

Tories want to kill ‘two-for-one’ prison-time credit

Spike in refugee claims shows ‘abuse’ of system, Kenney says

There you go, Tory base. We may be spending at all-time record levels. We may be running $40-billion deficits, and bailing out auto companies, and ditching across-the-board tax cuts in favour of dozens of little social-engineering tax credits. We may have abandoned everything we ever stood for on Afghanistan, on Quebec, on corporate welfare, on foreign investment. We may have set up a regional development agency for southern Ontario.

But we’ll still protect you from a lot of imaginary threats like polygamy. We’ll still beat up on refugees, and prisoners. We’ll still whip up hysteria over crime. Because sometimes you just have to do the unassailably popular thing, when it’s the unassailably popular thing to do.

The Federal Court of Appeal has overturned a Federal Court ruling that had essentially scuppered the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement on refugees. (That’s the thing that got rid of all those unsightly northbound queues of the world’s downtrodden at various points along the 49th parallel, which you may remember from the 1990s, by prohibiting most refugee claims at land border crossings and forcing asylum-seekers already in the U.S. to try their luck in the less permissive American system.) The provisions of the agreement had remained in effect while the government appealed, but as the editorial notes, getting rid of it would have meant “a nightmare of complications” for a refugee system that’s already stretched to its breaking point. So I was rather surprised to learn all this from an approving Globe and Mail editorial, which, bizarrely, seems to be the only mention of this very important event anywhere in the entire media.

The Globe’s main point is that the original ruling was a vast overreach based on a woefully superficial negative assessment of the American refugee system, and I have no quarrel with that. But particularly in the absence of other coverage, readers of that editorial could be forgiven if they thought the Safe Third Country Agreement was a coherent, mutually beneficial, fair deal for Canada and the United States, and for refugees. This is a pet issue of mine, and I must protest that it is not any of those things. At best, it’s a fudge.

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