{"id":72842,"date":"2017-03-02T07:18:59","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T07:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/?p=72842"},"modified":"2017-03-02T07:18:59","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T07:18:59","slug":"how-to-read-canadas-cameos-during-trumps-speech-to-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/political\/how-to-read-canadas-cameos-during-trumps-speech-to-congress.html","title":{"rendered":"How to read Canada&#8217;s cameos during Trump&#8217;s speech to Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Canada&#8217;s ears were burning slightly Tuesday night when U.S. President Donald Trump\u00a0addressed Congress for the first time. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Trump referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by name when mentioning a task force to help women in the workplace, he touched on the Keystone XL project, and he pointed to Canada&#8217;s &#8220;merit-based&#8221; immigration system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It came on the heels of a number of Canadian cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister Bill Morneau, making the trip to Washington to meet with their U.S. counterparts.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"javascript:void(0)\">Same Trump policies, dressed in new &#8216;presidential&#8217; packaging<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>WATCH |\u00a0<a href=\"javascript:void(0)\">Trump&#8217;s full speech to\u00a0Congress<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"javascript:void(0)\"><strong>&#8216;Real and positive immigration reform is possible&#8217; Trump says<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span>But it&#8217;s still unclear if Canada is making an impact on the real decision makers in Washington.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>&#8220;At the moment, it feels like everything is being run out of the White House,&#8221; said Tamara Keith, a White House correspondent with National Public Radio told CBC&#8217;s <em>The House<\/em> midweek podcast.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>&#8220;Someone like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it&#8217;s not clear that he is influencing policy. It&#8217;s not 100 per cent clear that he speaks for the president of the United States when he talks to world leaders.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>One of the exceptions, she said, is Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, the man who will be working with\u00a0Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.<\/p>\n<p><span>Last week on <em>The House<\/em>, Goodale told host Chris Hall he <a href=\"javascript:void(0)\">would raise the issue of illegal border crossings<\/a> with senior U.S. officials.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>While Trump&#8217;s Tuesday night speech didn&#8217;t reference those asylum seekers heading north, it focused heavily on cracking down on illegal immigration.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>&#8220;It&#8217;s not clear that the Trump White House is clamouring to keep people,&#8221; Keith pointed out. <\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Breaking the law often &#8216;the only option&#8217;<\/h2>\n<p><span>His speech is unlikely to reassure\u00a0<\/span>Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, who has serious concerns about people risking their lives to illegally enter Canada from the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s helping lead a charge to convince Canada to\u00a0end the Third Safe Country Agreement with the United States, which states that refugees must make a claim at the first safe country they arrive in.<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<p>&#8220;Refugees are, by nature, forced to go outside the law because they&#8217;re not receiving protection in their home country. Countries like Canada actually do a lot to make it difficult for them to get to a place of safety,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p> <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/74b04_refugees-border-20170226.jpg\" alt=\"Refugees Border 20170226\" width=\"100%\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"figure-caption\">Asylum seekers move carefully along a railway overpass in Emerson, Man., early Sunday morning. (John Woods\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Because of that, the convention states that refugees must not be penalized for entering the country irregularly or violating immigration laws because often that is the only option.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Dench argues that the U.S. doesn&#8217;t protect all refugees.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There are many circumstances where [refugees] are put into detention, they&#8217;re not given access to a lawyer. Refugee determination is made in a very slap-happy way with decision makers only having a few minutes to make a decision,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And so mistakes are made and people who need protection are not granted it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Dench said it&#8217;s been hard to get clear\u00a0statistics\u00a0from the government about how many people have been crossing illegally into Canada from the U.S.,\u00a0but said<em>\u00a0<\/em>there&#8217;s been a dramatic decrease in the number of claims in Canada overall.<\/p>\n<p>She said in the early 2000s, the country was averaging about 31,000 claims every year, but that dropped down to an average of about 13,000 from 2013 to 2015.<\/p>\n<p>Dench said her organization doesn&#8217;t know the act reason why the number of claims dropped, but at the end of 2012, &#8220;the government brought in a new refugee determination system and right after that the numbers really descended dramatically.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Gradually we&#8217;ve seen those numbers go up but they&#8217;re still way below what we were seeing in the 2000s. So when people say the numbers are twice as much as last year, bear in mind that we&#8217;re starting from a much, much lower state than we&#8217;ve had in the past.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<hr \/>\n<p><em>The full version of The House airs Saturday mornings at 9 a.m., 9:30 a.m. NT.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>You can subscribe to our podcast through our website, iTunes or other podcasting apps, and get a new show automatically every Wednesday and Saturday.<\/em><\/p>\n<p \/>\n<p \/>\n<p \/>\n<p \/>\n<p>Article source: http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/radio\/thehouse\/midweek-podcast-canada-s-cameos-during-trump-s-speech-to-congress-1.4004435?cmp=rss<\/a>\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Canada&#8217;s ears were burning slightly Tuesday night when U.S. President Donald Trump\u00a0addressed Congress for the first time. Trump referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by name when mentioning a task force to help women in the workplace, he touched on the Keystone XL project, and he pointed to Canada&#8217;s &#8220;merit-based&#8221; immigration system. It came on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-72842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","tag-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}