How does Stephen Harper's response to the Syrian refugee crisis stack up?

In words that could apply equally to Canadian outgoing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, newspaper columnist, Paddy Ashdown, has ridiculed British Prime Minister David Cameron’s offer for Britain to take 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years saying, "Nothing shows the prime minister’s tone deafness to the urgency of this situation better than this pathetic plan." In The Guardian of Monday, September 7th, Ashdown writes:

"Not only is this response calibrated more by political expediency than compassion, he has also indicated he believes the answer to the problem is more bombing. If the best part of two years of bombing with more than enough high explosive hasn't solved this problem, how would Britain’s widow’s mite of a few extra bombs help? Military strikes against Isis are failing, not because we do not have enough high explosive, but because we do not have a diplomatic strategy on Syria that would make sense of the military action."

I should point out that most of these refugees are not fleeing from ISIS but from the Assad regime! They were in refugee camps before ISIS hit the world news.

To date, the Harper Conservative government has accepted 2,300 Syrian refugees, and Stephen Harper, assuring us that the government is 'seized' with this issue,  has pledged to bring 10,000 more from the Middle East over the next four years if re-elected - just half the number promised by Cameron. The shortfall is in orders of magnitude even for the more 'generous' proposals of Mulcair and Trudeau. Compare against the 1.5 million in Turkey, or the 800,000 who will be accepted by Germany, or the 68,500 who settled in France last year.

Not In My Back Yard

Now here's a thought: The numbers we see fleeing the Syrian conflict will be tiny compared with the population movements we will soon be seeing as global warming compels more and more family crop farmers and cattle and goat herding farmers and nomads to leave their traditional lands and become migrant refugees. These people will not fit the current definition of refugees, let alone have paperwork to help them qualify for immigration anywhere; but Pope Francis is already saying that they are, indeed, environmental refugees.

What we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. Clinging to miserly NIMBY-ism will carry a huge cost. Are there any white, 3rd or 4th generation Canadians who are not here because their forefathers (and mothers) immigrated here in search of a better life? Do we not justifiably hold them in grateful awe for the hardships they endured so that their descendants could have a better life?