Seventeen-year-old Sadaf Khan went to hospital in Montreal on election day
after starting to cough up blood. Doctors think she might have bleeding
ulcers. If you were in her shoes, you would probably be suffering from
ulcers as well.

At an age when Canadian children are expected to be facing nothing more
traumatic than final exams and proms, Sadaf has had to assume the public
defence of her parents and three younger siblings. Because of her fluent
French and English, this award-winning student has been eloquently
pleading at press conferences for someone from Immigration Canada to spare
her family from deportation and a fate too awful to contemplate.

The Canadian government has acknowledged problems with the way Canada
judges refugees and has introduced procedures to eliminate patronage from
the appointment process for refugee judges. But until all the patronage
appointees are gone, no one can state with certainty that the Khans, or
any other case has been fairly heard.

Here is what we do know: If the Khans are deported, they would first be
sent to the United States, where they would likely be separated, with the
father held in detention - the standard treatment for Muslim men without
legal status in the U.S. Sadaf, her mother and three siblings would have
to fend for themselves, relying on charities such as the Salvation Army.

After several months, they would be deported to Pakistan, where they are
part of the Shia minority. Amnesty International and many others have
documented the violence directed at Shias and other religious minorities
in Pakistan. In the past month alone, Shias were the victims of suicide
bombings, targeted killings and assaults.

The Khan family is hard-working and law-abiding. They have three children
who win awards at school and a toddler born in Canada. Why is Canada,
which prides itself on humanitarian values, and does not even meet its
annual immigration targets, deporting them? Good question.

Having been refused refugee status, the Khans applied for permanent
residence in Canada on humanitarian grounds. However, in a twist that
defies belief, the local Immigration Canada office will not even rule on
the file because it is tied up somewhere in Alberta, where such
applications must be filed. Thus, because of its own internal-processing
delays, Immigration Canada will not study the humanitarian application
before the family is removed from Canada.

This bureaucratic indifference to the plight of the Khan family is but one
manifestation of what seems to be a general hardening of attitudes toward
refugees and humanitarian cases at Immigration Canada. Children are paying
a particularly high price for this chill.

According to the Supreme Court of Canada, immigration agents are supposed
to be "alert, alive and sensitive to the best interests of the child."
This means agents are supposed to examine carefully the impact on a child
- particularly a Canadian-born child - of having to return to their
parents' country of origin, where they might face civil unrest, poor
education and health care or worse.

In fact, many immigration agents are simply dismissing the "best interests
of the child" issue with a perfunctory sentence stating that, if the
children are young, they will be fine as long as the family stays
together. No mention is made of whether or not they will face poorer life
prospects growing up in Pakistan or Ethiopia, for example.

Two other cases that have been in the news recently were rejected with
this this type of off-handed statement. The Syed family, with three
children - two born in Canada - is facing deportation on July 22. They are
from the Kashmir region, disputed between India and Pakistan, where
thousands of civilians have been killed. The well-being of 7-year- old
Canadian-born Baruk Teferra was similarly dismissed last year. He has
spent nearly a year confined with his mother, Menen Ayele, and two sisters
in a Montreal church to avoid deportation to poverty- and
violence-stricken Ethiopia.

Another sign of the big chill in attitudes toward refugees is that Canada
has become so effective at aggressively "interdicting" potential refugee
claimants overseas that the numbers arriving here have plummeted.
Interdicting means detecting and stopping anyone who does not have proper
travel documents - something most legitimate refugees could never hope to
obtain. Result: About 22,000 refugee claimants are expected to make it to
Canada this year, down from 33,000 last year and more than 50,000 a few
years ago.

Ironically, even if we accepted every single refugee claimant who managed
to make it to Canada (less than half are accepted), we would still fall
short of our annual immigration targets - yet we are jeopardizing the
well-being of children, and deporting people to very troubled countries to
push numbers lower. Once again, it defies belief.

Prime Minister Paul Martin has been granted a fresh mandate but has also
acknowledged Canadians expect better. Let us hope the prime minister and
his immigration minister start anew by changing Immigration Canada's
approach to humanitarian immigration immediately, before it is too late
for the children of the Khan, Syed, Ayele and many other families.

---------------

Richard Goldman is refugee protection co-ordinator for the Table de
concertation des organismes au service des personnes refugiees et
immigrantes, a Quebec-based coalition of groups serving refugees and
immigrants.