I can’t believe this Canadian-American agreement to close Roxham Road.

We understand that there are still some details to be defined. Where exactly is the devil hiding…

It appears that the 2004 Safe Third Countries Agreement is now being applied across borders. There is no doubt that Quebec’s geographic location will remain a major gateway for asylum seekers.

Challenge

The current global migration crisis challenges the Canadian model in these matters: our government has long been content to simply select its refugees from camps around the world. It received relatively few at its borders.

The post-Roxham era will not bring us back to that “comfortable” era. Refugees will continue to arrive.

We’ve had some “ripples” in the past. In Quebec, the so-called “boat people” were welcomed in the 1970s thanks in part to Jacques Couture, René Lévesque’s immigration minister. In the early 1980s there were also the Haitians (people who, by the way, were able to become proud Quebecers thanks to the politics of the time).

However, compared to what other countries have experienced, these experiences represent ripples.

The German case

In Germany alone, 1.2 million asylum applications were received in 2014 and 2015.

The Federal Republic of Germany also experienced a similar immigration in the early 1990s, the authors Jennifer Elrick and Daniel Béland recall in a very interesting article in the magazine Political Options (“The Roxham Road and the Lessons of Germany”, March 15).

In her opinion, Canada could draw inspiration from several aspects of the refugee reception system implemented in the German federal government.

In particular, a “redistribution of the refugees” to the 16 federal states (corresponds to the federal states), which takes place “according to the tax revenue and the number of inhabitants of the respective federal state”. Those who are “more populous” and “more economically powerful” receive proportionally more applicants than those with “fewer populations and smaller economies”.

A key “

A redistribution formula was defined decades ago, the Königstein key. Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for Canadian Studies, on the QUB mic on Thursday compared it to that of Canadian equalization, “less complicated”!

According to Béland, if such a distribution program were implemented in our Dominion, Alberta should receive more applicants.

Technology is also involved. Once an applicant submits an application, from anywhere, “an electronic system will automatically identify the state processing their file and they will be sent there immediately (at the expense of the first state they arrive in)”.

Obviously, no system is perfect: would our charters, as interpreted by the courts, accept the restrictions on free movement caused by this type of system? Quebec’s linguistic imperatives would most likely complicate things as well.

But there is no doubt that a careful examination of what is being done in one of Europe’s most populous countries would be beneficial in a number of ways in the post-Roxham period that is about to begin.