“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.”

So Kenney told CBC News when it presented him with the fact that 289 children of asylum-seekers are being held in Canadian detention centres while their parents’ immigration status is being decided. He had no comment on what can been openly seen and photographed: children’s outdoor slides surrounded by actual razor-wire fences, guards, surveillance cameras and rooms with barred windows.

Of the detained children, 75 are under 5 years old, 65 are aged 6 to 9, 55 are 10 to12 and 92 are between 13 and 17, the CBC reported. It would be one thing if these children were allowed to live with their families, but no. Canada keeps the fathers in a separate section of the building. Children and their mothers can visit them only at set times. It’s like a divorce court where fathers are automatically presumed at fault.

When you make the decision to come to Canada to seek asylum, you come with your family. Whether Canada says yes or no — and there is great dispute over whether we decide these matters fairly or not — you assume that your tiny children will not be taken from your arms.

Canada does that. The consequences are terrible. The bewildered and frightened children can’t sleep, aren’t in school, are bullied, bereft and psychologically scarred.

As the CBC reports, Britain, Belgium and Japan are among the nations that have followed the Convention on the Rights of the Child and stopped locking up children as their parents’ cases wind through the courts.

It’s not as if the Conservative government suddenly had a bright idea on how to contain refugee claimants. This is an old technique that has been discredited. Other countries have already tried the method Kenney favours — splitting up families and incarcerating innocent children — and they themselves have had their reputations scarred.

Did Ottawa not study Europe’s failures? Why is it repeating them now?