is running a story about another Canadian immigrant who was sent to Syria, seemingly with the knowledge and participation of the Canadian government, and held (and tortured) for over a year: For the first time, Abdullah Almalki tells his story. The Maher Arar case is well-known, but the disturbing thing is that there are more Arars out there and their cases are not being considered.
It’s disturbing because it shows that there’s a huge systemic unwillingness in Canada do actually do anything at all about terrorism and related issues. Almalki may or may not have been a Really Bad Guy, but it’s beside the point. If we have people here who may be terrorists or whatever, we must have the processes in place (and the balls) to do what has to be done here. I don’t think that ever includes torture, but I don’t think they sent him to Syria just to offload the torture on them – I think there’s a deeper problem: a general lack of will to deal with this issue as if it were truly ours.
Ed Bilodeau says
Aren’t our current laws enough? What more do we need to do?
Michael Boyle says
Current laws may or may not be enough, but the laws themselves are only a part of the story. Are there enough people on staff to deal with the situation, and more importantly, at the moments when these decisions become political, do the politicians have the balls to make the tough, yet moral, decisions?
That’s what I question. In Canada we don’t believe in torture, morally, legally or in any other way. Yet in a moment of panic it seems that we used loopholes in dual-citizenship laws and practices to let people be sent to BE tortured in their other country of citizenship.
That’s not a question for the law but a question for the people who would rather wash their hands of a perceived problem than deal with it in Canada, in the context of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a largely transparent system.