Khaya Dlanga touches on something that has annoyed me about the Brandon Huntley controversy: the extent to which South Africans have engaged in gratuitous Canada-bashing:

A lot of people seem to have missed the point. It was not the Canadian government that gave the famed and now much vilified Huntley refugee status. It was not a law passed by the Canadian parliament or their constitutional court. A tribunal that is given the authority to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis. Many of us are already doing our best to vilify and insult Canada. They did not do this. Just a group of ignorant citizens given too much power.

Khaya correctly notes that it was not the elected branches of the Canadian government that made this specific decision (in fact, the Canadian federal government is currently trying to have it reversed), but he’s wrong to imply that Canada’s policy on refugees is somehow separate from the rest of its government, or its foreign policy in general.

On the contrary, Canada’s foreign policy and refugee policy both stem from the same set of principles. Over the past twenty years, Canada has made a consistent, good-faith effort to advance the interests of developing countries. More so than almost any other Western nation (with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries), Canada has made this a central tenet of its foreign policy. It has transformed its military into a force that is heavily focussed on peacekeeping. It has promoted intellectual concepts, such as “human security”, that are designed to improve the lives of people in poor and unstable countries. And it gives away a large amount of foreign aid, relative to the size of its population and its economy.

Canada also has a relatively lenient policy on refugees. It has the fourth-largest refugee population in the developing world, behind Germany, the United States and Britain. This is not by accident, but by design, and is completely consistent with the rest of Canada’s foreign policy. Canada makes it comparatively easy for refugees to gain asylum, so that people fleeing despotic and abusive governments have somewhere to go.

And now, because a white South African took advantage of Canada’s liberal policy on refugees, we have prominent journalists like Ray Hartley writing that “[the decision] says more about Canadian perceptions than South African reality”, and the ANC releasing a statement which says that “Canada’s reasoning for granting Huntley a refugee status can only serve to perpetuate racism”. To put it mildly, this is insane.