My name is Craig Damian Smith. I'm the associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
I just want to thank you and say it's a privilege to be part of this discussion.
I want to open by stating that the conversation comes at a pivotal moment for what we call “global migration governance”. It's a time when the international humanitarian system, multilateral institutions and the rules-based international order are increasingly under strain and even under threat by some member states. The global compact on refugees can help reinvigorate the norms, laws and institutions that make up the international refugee regime.
Canada can play a strong leadership role, but unfortunately, at the moment it seems that our role is mostly rhetorical. It's time to stop resting on our laurels. Concretely, this means a serious and sustained effort to increase our official development assistance and dismantle some of the silos between and within the federal government in order to deliberate effectively. I'll return to that point in a moment.
The committee has heard from leading experts and practitioners. I'm assuming that you know the state of affairs. You know that the New York declaration of 2016 was endorsed by all UN member states, that Canada played a leading role in developing both of the compacts, and that they reflect the balance of interests between hosts and donor states. Now it's time to do the actual work.
I want to reiterate a few basic facts about why we need the global compact on refugees and what Canada can do.
First, the international humanitarian system is failing. The current financial and political commitments cannot meet the needs of displaced people or of the states that host them. Second, the burden for dealing with displaced people disproportionately falls on poorer, more fragile states.
To date, the international community has focused on what we call a “care and maintenance” approach for dealing with displaced people. That entails short-term humanitarian funding to try to meet people's basic needs while they look for a durable solution to their displacement. We know that the international community recognizes three durable solutions to people's refugee status: return to countries of origin, naturalization in their host states, or third country resettlement internationally.
The refugee regime wasn't designed for the current displacement dynamics. Most people can't return home, and only a tiny fraction are resettled internationally every year. The effect of that is increasingly protracted refugee situations.
Protracted refugee populations and protracted humanitarian aid can distort host state labour and housing markets, strain resources, upset political and ethnic balances, and foster animosity with host communities. Host states are understandably reluctant to use international development assistance for refugees. Weak solidarity from donor states means that they have little incentive to naturalize or integrate refugees.
These protracted refugee situations and funding shortfalls have given rise to a growing phenomenon of what we call “irregular secondary movement”. That's when, rather than stagnating in host countries and waiting for a chance at international resettlement that's very likely not going to come, refugees decide to pay human smugglers to try to make it to a safe country where they and their families might have some kind of future.
The fact that migrants and refugees share the same irregular migration system—so they are what we call “complex mixed flows”—is one of the sources of anti-refugee sentiment in liberal democracies, where everyone claiming asylum is immediately suspected of being a mere economic migrant or a queue-jumper. It seems to not matter that no queue actually exists, that the migrant-refugee distinctions are often blurry at best, that global north states see an infinitesimal proportion of refugees globally, and that we have the resources to properly scale our asylum systems. Unfortunately, scapegoating refugees and whipping up fear about public safety is a well-worn tactic for electoral gain.
At the same time, the states that built the refugee regime are abandoning the pretense of rights and due process by offshoring migration controls to authoritarian states, militarizing borders and cutting social assistance to make their countries less favourable destinations.
Effective international burden-sharing can help forestall this race to the bottom. Not coincidentally, that's the basic premise of the global compact on refugees.
The main mechanism for this burden-sharing, the one I want to talk about, is the comprehensive refugee response framework, or the CRRF. The CRRF calls for new and additional international contributions at the nexus of humanitarian and development aid, or as they called it at the World Humanitarian Summit, the new way of working.
The main goal of linking humanitarian and development programming through the CRRF is to foster the inclusion and self-reliance of displaced people and to concurrently relieve the burden on host states. It's as much a forward-looking way of dealing with displaced people as it is a political recognition that most of them are not going to go home or be resettled.