Canada should take World Refugee Day to pat itself on the back for leadership during the current refugee crisis, then get to work on designing better policies to help the growing number of displaced people around the world.
That was the message from Sean Speer, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, in a series of interviews on CBC stations across the country this week.
“The target that Prime Minister Trudeau set out for Syrian refugees was ambitious and it took the collective compassion, generosity and civic engagement of millions of Canadians to achieve it,” said Speer.
“But we need to take stock of what we’ve accomplished, learn lessons from the experience and use those lessons to develop a smarter, more coherent, systematic refugee policy because…sadly the global crisis isn’t abating, quite the contrary.”
Speer recommends more bottom-up consulting with communities, churches, mosques and other local and national groups.
