This is a distressing record. The number of uprooted people worldwide passed the 120 million mark in May. Imagine all the Japanese thrown out of their populous country at once, empty-handed. The most recent figures place Japan twelfth in the world for population; That’s a lot of broken lives to put back together. Far too much given the resources that we have deigned to devote so far to this titanic challenge.
By cascading effect, these distant crises spill over into our backyard. As proof, this year Canada made a remarkable appearance at the top of the rankings of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And not least. In this recently published report on the situation of forced displacement in the world, it has recently taken its place in the top five countries with a system for determining refugee status having received the greatest number of asylum requests in 2023. Behind the United States, Germany, Egypt and Spain.
No offense to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, this influx fueled by growing instabilities is indeed fueling a migratory rout whose effects are tearing Canadians and Quebecers apart. Our reception system is not adapted to today’s challenges, let alone those of tomorrow. Because if Canada recorded a peak in asylum applications at 146,800 in 2023, 2024 heralds a new peak. More than 62,000 applications have already been processed in the first four months of 2024, compared to just under 38,000 during the same period last year.
We also learn that Canada is carving out a special place for itself in the “resettlement” of the most at-risk refugees. In 2023, more than 158,700 refugees have been “resettled” worldwide, including nearly 51,100 here. That’s almost a third! The effort is immense for a country as sparsely populated as ours. But there remains a drop of water in a stormy sea of two million broken destinies that need to be urgently resettled.
This colossal effort on our scale is very poorly sustained on a daily basis. François Legault perhaps abuses hyperbole by calling out the “humanitarian crisis” in Quebec, but he sees our actions without pretense or pretense, including their share of bitter failures. Not a week goes by without our headlines reporting cruel examples attesting to our inability to decently take care of the migrants who knock on our doors. Not to mention those who are made to wait in purgatory, following a long process that is as frustrating as it is impoverishing.
In the name of natural justice and basic decency, the keys to which we seem to have lost, we must manage to do better, if we cannot do more. Because here, as elsewhere in the world, forced uprooting continues to increase. And with it, an escalation in securing migration, which feeds fear and oppression, the bane of a social climate which is already going down the drain.
You will have to answer it carefully if you don’t want to be overwhelmed. Ten years ago, 1 in 125 people were forcibly displaced. One in 69 people are now uprooted in the same way.
Climate instability is preponderant in this forced back and forth, which adds a weighty argument to the need to engage in a just and sustainable transition. By the end of 2023, nearly three in four displaced people lived in countries where exposure to climate change risks was high or extreme. The multiplication of conflicts is also crucial. Nearly one in two uprooted people lived in a country where they were exposed to conflict during the same period.
Last summer, we lamented in this column that the world had become the scene of an exceptional number of conflicts (56 in 2020), unheard of since the early 1990s. We should have strived for better, but we have rather managed to do worse. Last week, the Oslo Peace Research Institute told us that the counter has stopped at 59 conflicts in 2023. Unheard of since the end of the Cold War, it calculates in its report.
In the shadow of the highly publicized wars in Gaza and Ukraine, we forget that the outbreaks of violence in Sudan will have indeed caused one of the largest humanitarian and displacement crises in the world with more than 7.2 million displaced people. last year. The escalation of violence in Myanmar will have led to the displacement of more than 1.3 million people within the country by the end of 2023.
These figures tell the story of millions of human tragedies whose singularity is too easy to forget.
Above all, they tell the story of our collective failure to maintain peace and security in the world, with forced displacement being the indisputable direct consequence. It is these root causes as a priority that we must tackle, and this, in a spirit of cooperation that only a revitalized multilateralism can still save. As long as we set about reinventing our codes.