Oh dear. Convicted fraudster Conrad Black is coming back to Canada. Hang onto your wallets.
New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair accuses the government of favoritism for allowing this particular convicted felon — who is no longer a Canadian citizen — into the country. And Mulcair is right. That’s how the system works.
The law gives Ottawa great leeway in deciding which non-citizens get in. The government may bar a felon, or indeed anyone it can reasonably claim threatens public safety. But it doesn’t have to do so.
So the Conservatives let in the felons they like — such as Black.
And they bar those they don’t like.
The NDP raised the case of Gary Freeman, an American who served 30 days in jail in the U.S. four years ago for wounding a Chicago police officer under disputed circumstances in the ’60s.
Freeman spent most of his life in Canada and has a wife and four children here. But Ottawa won’t let him cross the border to see them.
Is this fair? I’m not sure it is. But it is, apparently, legal.
There are other cases. The Conservatives twice barred Chicagoan Bill Ayers from entering Canada. He had no trouble crossing the border before Stephen Harper became prime minister. He does now.
Ayers has never been convicted of anything. His sin, it seems, was to be a founding member of the Weather Underground, a radical ’60s group. Some members of that group (although not Ayers) were later convicted of bomb outrages.
Ayers also worked on Chicago social welfare projects with a man named Barack Obama. Perhaps that is being held against him too. Because of what the government calls privacy concerns, we shall never know.
Privacy concerns were the reasons given by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney Tuesday when he refused to talk about Black in the Commons.
Well, almost refused to talk. Kenney did say he had nothing to do with the Black decision and had deliberately left it to low-level bureaucrats.
Perhaps. But a suspicious person might recall another case in which Kenney claimed to have had no input.
That was the government’s famous 2009 decision to bar British MP George Galloway from Canada.
Galloway too has never been charged with a crime. But he had helped deliver food to besieged, Hamas-controlled Gaza. On those grounds, he was excluded from Canada.
At the time, a Kenney spokesman claimed the minister played no active role in the decision.
But, a federal court judge later determined this wasn’t true. Justice Richard Mosley found that Kenney’s office had ordered bureaucrats to exclude Galloway and had done so for political rather than legitimate security reasons.
What does Conrad Black have that George Galloway lacks? Money is one thing. Black himself says he still has around $80 million to play with.
He also has friends in high places — or if not friends at least acolytes. Black’s media defenders are already falling over one another to declare what a fine chap he is.
Exactly why Black wants to return is a mystery. He famously renounced his Canadian passport in 2001 to sit in the British House of Lords. At the time, he said he was glad to wash the dust of this socialistic, medicare-loving country from his feet.
“My native country had become for me not an opportunity, nor even a nationality susceptible to reason, but a trap,” he told the right-of-centre Fraser Institute then. Canadian citizenship, he went on, had become “an impediment to my progress.”
I guess he likes us better now. But why? We’re really very much the same. Hardly deserving of his eminence.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Thomas Walkom
New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair accuses the government of favoritism for allowing this particular convicted felon — who is no longer a Canadian citizen — into the country. And Mulcair is right. That’s how the system works.
The law gives Ottawa great leeway in deciding which non-citizens get in. The government may bar a felon, or indeed anyone it can reasonably claim threatens public safety. But it doesn’t have to do so.
So the Conservatives let in the felons they like — such as Black.
And they bar those they don’t like.
The NDP raised the case of Gary Freeman, an American who served 30 days in jail in the U.S. four years ago for wounding a Chicago police officer under disputed circumstances in the ’60s.
Freeman spent most of his life in Canada and has a wife and four children here. But Ottawa won’t let him cross the border to see them.
Is this fair? I’m not sure it is. But it is, apparently, legal.
There are other cases. The Conservatives twice barred Chicagoan Bill Ayers from entering Canada. He had no trouble crossing the border before Stephen Harper became prime minister. He does now.
Ayers has never been convicted of anything. His sin, it seems, was to be a founding member of the Weather Underground, a radical ’60s group. Some members of that group (although not Ayers) were later convicted of bomb outrages.
Ayers also worked on Chicago social welfare projects with a man named Barack Obama. Perhaps that is being held against him too. Because of what the government calls privacy concerns, we shall never know.
Privacy concerns were the reasons given by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney Tuesday when he refused to talk about Black in the Commons.
Well, almost refused to talk. Kenney did say he had nothing to do with the Black decision and had deliberately left it to low-level bureaucrats.
Perhaps. But a suspicious person might recall another case in which Kenney claimed to have had no input.
That was the government’s famous 2009 decision to bar British MP George Galloway from Canada.
Galloway too has never been charged with a crime. But he had helped deliver food to besieged, Hamas-controlled Gaza. On those grounds, he was excluded from Canada.
At the time, a Kenney spokesman claimed the minister played no active role in the decision.
But, a federal court judge later determined this wasn’t true. Justice Richard Mosley found that Kenney’s office had ordered bureaucrats to exclude Galloway and had done so for political rather than legitimate security reasons.
What does Conrad Black have that George Galloway lacks? Money is one thing. Black himself says he still has around $80 million to play with.
He also has friends in high places — or if not friends at least acolytes. Black’s media defenders are already falling over one another to declare what a fine chap he is.
Exactly why Black wants to return is a mystery. He famously renounced his Canadian passport in 2001 to sit in the British House of Lords. At the time, he said he was glad to wash the dust of this socialistic, medicare-loving country from his feet.
“My native country had become for me not an opportunity, nor even a nationality susceptible to reason, but a trap,” he told the right-of-centre Fraser Institute then. Canadian citizenship, he went on, had become “an impediment to my progress.”
I guess he likes us better now. But why? We’re really very much the same. Hardly deserving of his eminence.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Thomas Walkom
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