Writing this on Boxing Day in the afterglow of last night’s traditional family dinner, I can’t help but think about the hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced people for whom this is a season of abject fear in Donald Trump’s USA. I was inspired by the lyrics of British singer Billy Bragg’s “Put Christ Back into Christmas, especially the lines:

In haste to vilify you forget
Christ was a refugee
King Herod’s murderous orders caused
His family to flee
Into the land of Egypt
Where their safety did lie
Would you refuse to let him in
And send him back to die?
…
Should Christ come back today
If he were forced to choose a side
I tell you without doubt
That he’d embrace the refugee
And cast the fascist out

According to the Christian Bible, Jesus was a refugee whose parents had to flee to Egypt due to a well-founded fear of his being murdered by agents of King Herod. Fortunately, for them, Egypt was then a province of Rome, whose emperor Caesar Augustus had no equivalent to Trump’s paramilitary ICE agents rounding up, incarcerating and summarily deporting to violent regimes anyone they perceive as possibly being an “undocumented” person without judicial oversight. Were Jesus and his family to appear today, they would certainly be considered undocumented.

Many Canadians believe that, while the US is now allowing such blatant violations of basic human rights to occur with impunity, the Charter of Rights would never permit such abuses here. However, were Trump to take over Canada, we would entirely lose that protection, opening the door to involuntary vacations in deadly El Salvador prisons. Perhaps we should also be wary of certain provinces applying the Notwithstanding Clause whenever they wish to do something which would violate our rights.