Here we are again, at the time of annual reviews and the inevitable melancholy of the slow days that separate Christmas from New Year’s Eve. By chance, I went back to see what I hoped for in these pages for 2023, at same date last year. After a year 2022 marked by the challenges of post-pandemic resocialization, I wrote then, I hoped that 2023 would be the year of healing, the year where we would relearn how to take care of others and the places we reside. I tell myself that the column does at least that: leave a trace of our poor reading of things — it’s healthy for the ego.
If we had to choose one word to talk about 2023, it would probably be “cruelty”. On a global scale, the last twelve months have been marked by a confusing series of small and petty responses to crises whose gravity should have provoked responses on a human level.
At home, Prime Minister François Legault set the tone in February, by putting “the closure of Roxham Road” back on the agenda. Nothing better to start the year off on the right foot than to blow on the embers of anti-migrant panic.
In a letter addressed to his counterpart Justin Trudeau, François Legault, well aware of speaking in front of an audience, then listed the efforts already made by Quebec to welcome immigrants and asylum seekers. He urged the Canadian Prime Minister to quickly conclude the renegotiation of the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States, in order to curb irregular entries into Canada through Quebec territory.
At the same time, Quebec Minister of Immigration, Christine Fréchette, was delighted that almost all migrants crossing the border at Roxham were now being sent back to Ontario. The great victory over regular immigration is within reach, it was suggested, as long as Ottawa and Washington conclude their new Safe Third Country Agreement without delay.
Thus, at the end of March, these negotiations resulted in what, in the eyes of many, constituted the worst possible solution. While previously the Agreement only prohibited submitting an asylum application at official border crossings, it was extended to the entire land border between Canada and the United States. The return to the United States of people presenting themselves at both land border crossings and informal entry points has become almost systematic.
Needless to say, this fulfilled Francis’ wishes.
Legault, and led to the effective “closure” of Roxham Road. In a few weeks, the site was deserted. In Quebec, the arrival of the bulldozers that came to dismantle the infrastructure installed in Roxham was celebrated as a victory. But the erasure of this place, which has become symbolic, has not made the human distress it caused disappear.
As early as April, we learned, in a document published in the Canada Gazette, that the regulatory change brought about by the modernization of the Safe Third Country Agreement was particularly difficult to apply, given the extent of the border and its topography. Informal posts like Roxham at least had the advantage of bringing some order to irregular crossings, but the political victory of “closing Roxham” was too tempting. It prevailed over the actual achievement of the objectives set, and in the process undermined the human dignity of asylum seekers.
The migratory routes that cross the Americas have not seen a drop in traffic due to the hardening of borders in the north. They have simply become more dangerous, more ruthless. Repressive border policies do only one thing: look the other way.
This is also a global trend, with emergency migration intensifying everywhere. At the end of September, the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that 114 million people were displaced around the world, due to conflict or environmental disruption. This is a marked increase from 2022. This was before the start of the ferocious bombardment of Gaza, which added almost two million displaced (and trapped) people to this grim toll.
On this subject, one could hardly imagine a more striking illustration of the cruelty of the year 2023 than the violence inflicted on the Gazan population for more than 80 days now, under the complacent gaze of the international community.
I will be forgiven for this naivety, but I did not believe that the world would get used to watching a civilian population being bombed, starved, exposed to cold and disease in real time, while hesitating to utter the words “genocide”, “cleansing ethnic” or “ceasefire”. You have to believe that you get used to everything, even the worst.
This is also true — and even especially — when it comes to climate. A few days after COP28, while we were pleased to have included, in the final text of the agreement, the objective of a “transition” away from fossil fuels, the environmental journalist David Wallace-Wells summarized as follows: the agreement reached in Dubai: today we designate as “progress” a vision of the future that once terrified us.
Just a few years ago, the idea of exceeding the 1.5 degree warming threshold was frightening. But as current policy commitments move us toward 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century, even the most ludicrous promises are celebrated as victories. For 2024, we could at least wish for this: to stop tolerating the worst.