(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)
There was a rare consensus in the House of Commons last week. All parties voted in favour of a Conservative motion that called on the Trudeau government to bring criminal charges against Canadian citizens who travelled abroad to fight alongside the Islamic State.
“Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are calling on the Prime Minister to immediately table a plan to serve justice to anyone who left our country to fight with this terrorist organization,” said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, who introduced the motion.
Without providing specifics, Rempel added that the government should examine legal reforms to help ensure courts can access evidence against terror suspects.
The Conservatives are supposed to be the party of law and order, the party that prioritizes our safety and security over endless compassion, political correctness and virtue-signalling.
But when it comes to combating jihadist terrorism, the Conservatives seem to have lost their spine.
Not too long ago, the Conservatives knew that terrorists pose a greater threat than the individual crimes they commit. Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper believed in throwing the book at violent jihadists, and introduced a law to strip citizenship from dual citizens convicted of terrorism.
They used it to revoke citizenship from the Jordanian mastermind of the Toronto 18 terrorist plot.
According to Harper-era minister Jason Kenney, the law applied to “people who are convicted of violent disloyalty to Canada — who hate our country so much that they take up arms against it as members of a terrorist group or take up arms against it in a foreign army through the commission of treason or of war against Canada.”
Those were the good old days.
Today’s Conservatives, by contrast, are suggesting that we repatriate these terrorist thugs and try our luck to convict them through Canada’s bleeding-heart justice system.
The reality is that once these ISIS fighters are back on Canadian soil, they will no doubt be welcomed by a fan club of human rights lawyers who are all too happy to argue that the terrorists did nothing wrong.
A news conference on Tuesday helped prove this point.
The father of a British man who holds dual citizenship with Canada made an appeal to the Trudeau government to help his son, who is being held alongside captured ISIS jihadists in Syria.
The father stated that his son was only guilty of being a devout Muslim who naively travelled to Syria to try to help people. He insisted that there is no evidence his son carried out violence on behalf of ISIS and that this is all just one big misunderstanding.
This is a preview of what other returnees and their fancy lawyers will argue if they are permitted back into Canada and face charges.
The Western world is struggling with the menace of jihadist terrorism and the dilemma of what to do with enemy citizens who travel abroad to fight alongside terrorist armies.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stands out among world leaders in his naive and often absurd declarations of support for the rights and privileges of terrorist citizens. He’s on the fringe far-left when it comes to dealing with terrorism.
Canada needs a strong opposition party to hold Trudeau accountable and demand that the safety and security of Canadians come first.
Instead of trying to find common ground with the Trudeau Liberals, the Conservatives should stand up for…(READ MORE)
