Canada puts asylum toddlers behind razor wire - thestar.com ⇒
17 December 2012, mid-afternoon
“They are not jails,” insists Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. “In the case of the Toronto one, for example, the main one, it’s a former three-star hotel with a fence around it.”
If you need to start a sentence about where you are housing children with, “They are not jails,” you know you’re doing it wrong. Is Canada trying to out-class Australia here?
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
When I was in university, I worked two summers at the Toronto Immigration Detention Centre.
It’s not a jail. It doesn’t feel like a jail, it feels like a hotel…in fact, it WAS a hotel.
Better that children stay with their parents, than go into foster care.
The media likes to blow shit out of proportion.
It makes more interesting news.
by radmila on December 18 2012, 3:25 pm #
My family and I spent a month (maybe more?) in said Toronto Immigration Detention Centre in 1990 when I was 6 turning 7. It didn’t feel like a jail. The only thing that stayed with me was that I didn’t get to celebrate my birthday with a cake. I think that’s clearly a defining moment of my life.
by sh!ma on December 19 2012, 12:39 pm #
I would have snuck one in for you, Shima!
I worked there in ’84 and ’85…back then it was in the Avion Motor Hotel on Airport Road.
The reason I didn’t go back for a 3rd summer was because I used to bring requests in for the detainees.
I felt for the families that were staying there.
I was on my way to being fired for doing that because eventually, someone would have told on me.
by radmila on December 22 2012, 5:20 pm #