Metropolis Canada has awarded WRMC Chair Lloyd Axworthy with its 2025 Policy Maker Award of Excellence. The award recognizes and celebrates outstanding contributions to the field of immigration and settlement in Canada.
Watch the acceptance speech here:
Lloyd Axworthy Acceptance Speech
2025 Metropolis Canada Policy Maker Award of Excellence
Metropolis Canada Conference, Toronto, 15 March 2025
I am very pleased to be recipient of this year’s award of excellence for Canadian policy maker in the crucial field of migration, immigration and refugees. I really want to thank the committee and Jack Jedwab for their confidence. Metropolis has provided an enormous amount of important leadership in this country on these crucial issues.
I think this work is a sacred trust. I learned that when I became immigration minister many decades ago, when Ron Atkey, the Conservative member at the time, invited me out for lunch as we were making the transition. Ron said that an immigration minister has a sacred trust to first honor and respect the rights of those who are dispossessed and, secondly, to respect the rights and obligations of the Canadian government to its public to ensure that it’s an effective, efficient, fair and equitable system. Those two need to be always in the balance.
So, this award comes at a time when I think there are some big questions out there. Some of you know me as the chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council. We were established in 2017 as a corollary to the United Nations major conferences on Migration and Refugees to offer alternative ideas, pragmatic solutions, and action-oriented initiatives. I think we have tried to live up to that. So, I want to accept this award really as a recognition of the work of the Council. It is a volunteer organization worldwide in scope. And over the years we have tried to provide both advocacy but also to clearly mark new pathways to provide for the fair settlement of those who are fleeing conflicts, corruption, climate, and all the things that cause people to be uprooted.
And so I think this idea of a sacred trust has particular meaning in today’s world. The way in which the systems of immigration and refugees are now under attack is a huge challenge virtually in every part of the world, including in Canada. Particularly in today’s headlines, I am conscious of the Trump administration’s efforts at deportation, at the cancellation of the major support for refugee settlement around the world, and for a basic ethos, which is that we do not accept strangers through the gate.
We have become increasingly a world where the demand and the requirement to deal with migration becomes even more broad and challenging as the conditions that force people to flee, that require people to look for alternatives or are themselves forced out by the depravity or the predatory system of their own governments. It is now coming increasingly to be a worldwide issue. At the same time as the institutions, which were developed shortly after World War II, are becoming weaker, underfunded, and losing their sense of respect from the public.
So, Metropolis and the work that it does is absolutely crucial. It’s coming at a time when I think there has to be some real unity in this country. Canada has been, for a long time, a leader through ideas like our sponsorship programs and large-scale settlement. But in the last three or four years we’ve kind of lost our way. We turned immigration into an economic tool. It became unmanageable. Settlement demands were not met.
As a result, we are really beginning to feel the pressures of how do we respond. I think there’s been an awakening in the last several weeks because of the Trump challenges, for Canada to rethink, reset, revise how it does things. I think that is an important challenge for all of us who work in the field of immigration, migration, refugees and dispossessed people.
I’m hoping that through Metropolis and others, we can work in tandem, we can work together to start looking at some new architecture, certainly begin looking at where the resources come to fill the void left by the Trump withdrawals, and particularly to find a system that closely connects the impact of climate and conflict with the migration pressures of people. We have a lot of work to do, but I think that your organization and others are ready for that challenge.
I think it’s probably apt that I close my thanks to all of you for this honour by recalling the words of Charles Taylor, a Canadian political philosopher, maybe two decades ago, in his book, The Secular Age. He said, “Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates.”
Well, that was two decades ago. I think our regard for the needs of the strangers at the gate needs to be given new definition, new narrative, and new resources. I look forward to being part of the rebuilding we must do. Thank you again.
