Excerpts From Pat Carney’s Open Letter With A Few Brief Comments from NAL’s Doug Draper
“Act from your guts and your heart, not the pollsters and campaign. …Otherwise the Conservative Government should be swept out of office by a tsunami wave of anger that your government is so unresponsive to a humanitarian crisis of Biblical proportions.”
Former federal Conservative cabinet minister Pat Carney
Those powerful words and others were contained in an open letter Pat Carney, a former federal Conservative Party MP from British Columbia, a cabinet minister in the 1980s, and a Senator before retiring in 2008, sent to Harper Immigration Minister Chris Alexander this past Wednesday, September 2nd while the world was first casting eyes on the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy, washed up on a Turkish beach.
Carney – another example of earlier generations of federal Conservatives (like former Prime Minister Joe Clark and the late Flora MacDonald and Joe Reid, a St. Catharines MP who recently passed away) who bear no resemblance to the hornet’s nest of a Conservative Party governing Canada now – said she believes the country, given its size, could probably take in as many as 100,000 Syrian migrants compared to the palty 2,300 the Harper government has allowed in so far.
“There must be a way for Canada to respond NOW to the refugee tsunami under way in Europe to reduce the suffering of war-weary, homeless, desperate people, and bring 100,000 of them to Canada immediately,” added Carney in her note to Alexander
“You have been a bureaucrat and a minister and know there are ways we can act. Canadians know we must. And we have the bureaucratic capacity and the wealth to do so.”
Then she finished with this; “Like so many Canadians, my Irish ancestors came to Canada on the coffin ships to Quebec during the Famine of the 1840’s and were welcomed. …”
“My earliest memory is being evacuated down the Whangpoo River from Shanghai (where Carney was born and her parents lived and worked at the time) during the Japanese-Chinese War. Flight to freedom is a unique Canadian experience.”
“Please do what you can,” Carney urged, “to ensure that compassion is still a Canadian value.”
Always a person with a reputation for being gutsy when it comes to standing up for her beliefs, those characteristics have certainly come to the fore here over a humanitarian crisis I hope most Canadians want to see addressed with far more drive and compassion than is being shown by the Harper government.
Following the posting of her letter to Alexander on her Facebook page, Carney was quoted saying in an email to The Vancouver Sun; “Those little boys who drowned (meaning the three-year-old pictured on the beach and his five-year-old brother) were our children too. … Our government has been treating this unfolding tragedy as if it was occurring on a different planet.”
I would be remiss if I ended this post before drawing attention to one more thing Carney said in her letter to Alexander in response to Harper’s recent assertion that the ongoing bombing by Canada and the U.S. of Isis targets in Syria and Iraq is just as important around helping these people.
“A Prime Minister who responds by saying the answer is bombing the refugees’ homeland is beyond reason,” Carney wrote, and bless you Pat for saying that.
Once again you have shown us all why you earned and deserved your honourable place in the Order of Canada.
To hear a September 4th, 2015 interview with Pat Carney on this topic on CBC Radio’s ‘As It Happens’ program click on –www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/As+It+Happens/ID/2675005177/ .
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Canada should have an ocean vessel at the ready to bring these poor people to our land A week long journey at sea should provide ample time to weed out any terrorists who might be on board
they get a free round trip of course…
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I want to correct the insertion of the Word “Conservative” in this narrative pertaining to PAT CARNEY and the tongue lashing administered by Pat Carney to certain elements in the Conservative Party. That Correction is PAT CARNEY was a minister in the “PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE PARTY” not the abbreviated party (Called the Conservative Party) put together by the Judas like aspirations and deceit of PETER MacKAY and HARPER who contrived together and which in turn later eliminated the old and to many venerated Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. It is wonderful to realize there are still some true patriotic Progressive Conservatives alive who hate the fact that HARPER and MacKAY sank their ship of state to satisfy their greedy aspirations and I salute them with respect and dignity.
Yes!!! Will I was thinking of you when I wrote this truism
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It takes most governments very little time to mobilize troops or planes in times of crisis. This is a crisis. How long did it take to get those fighter jets to Syria? A couple of big transport planes fly maneuvers over my house every day. How about giving them a new job for a few weeks? I’m sure refugees would not mind the discomfort of sitting in a cargo plane after what they’ve been through thus far. Places like Budapest, Vienna, Naples, Athens and Ankara where these people are congregating, all have adequate airports for large planes.
Of course it must be a stipulation to hold these people in an encampment until their credentials are checked. We have plenty of room in Canada for temporary screening camps. It will cost money but I would sooner have my tax dollars spent there than on dropping bombs. I wonder how long it will be before one of our pilots is shot down and beheaded.
Remember that most of us in Canada (or our ancestors) were refugees or at least immigrants. Many of the Syrians in particular are well educated and could contribute to our future in positive ways.
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