Quote:
Originally Posted by Shawnski
Here we go again. Read back through the thread.... the Canadian government is only RE-INSTATING the requirement that was already in place up to October 2007.
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You keep saying this--but surely you can see a difference between leaving an existing visa requirement in place, and putting one back after first lifting it.
If there were currently a visa requirement in place, it wouldn't be hamhanded. In fact,
this is precisely why it's hamhanded.
As I said before, the Czechs, the Mexicans and now the Swedes clearly see a huge difference--or they wouldn't have taken retaliatory action. This is turning into a major fiasco--and all because Jason Kenney
lacked the ability to predict how other nations would react to unilateral actions by Canada.
THAT is the issue here. As I've said repeatedly--I have no issue
in principle with a visa requirement for any of these nations. I would, however, prefer to have an immigration minister who handles these situations with grace and common sense rather than blundering headlong into a situation where other nations, some of whom are in the EU, are taking retaliatory action against our country.
Heck, in this thread alone, about five different posters have suggested better ideas for dealing with the problem. You're one of them--so I feel like I'm preaching to the choir, but I'll suggest a few right now:
1. Why not triage asylum claims differently, based on country of origin? (this was your idea)
2. Why not crack down on third-party agencies in Canada that are facilitating fraudulent asylum claims?
3. Why not work with the governments of those nations to spread accurate information in the home countries of these claimants about asylum eligibility?
4. Why not streamline the claims process so that the "pre-hearing" stay time is short enough to not make fraudulent claims worthwhile?
If the CP braintrust can come up with these four off the tops of our heads, surely the immigration minister can come up with something that avoids retaliatory action and doesn't make a mountain out of a molehill. Instead, he went for cheap political points by going after easy targets, and now he gets to sleep in the bed that he made for himself.