While border security and building a border wall has been front and centre in the U.S. news, Canada has quietly been admitting and welcoming America’s illegal migrants.
As reported by the Canadian Press, Canada is proactively giving visas to those who were in the U.S. illegally.
According to Vanessa Routley, an immigration lawyer who helped someone who was an illegal migrant in the U.S. obtain a student visa in Canada, this would not have happened three years ago.
“In the past, if someone had failed to comply with the regulations of another country, Canada was not willing to take a chance on them to admit them and to ask them to follow our rules,” she told CP.
According to CP, “over the last few years, the Canadian government might have quietly revised its approach to some of these applications.”
Routley admitted she would not have accepted such a case a few years ago, but under the new government, the rules seemed to have changed. She has now successfully helped a few illegal migrant clients from the U.S. come to Canada legally.
After a gruesome terrorist attack in Edmonton, where a Somali refugee was accused of driving a truck into a crowd, running over five people and stabbing a police officer, we learned the man had once been an illegal migrant in the U.S.
Abdulahi Hasam Sharif illegally crossed the U.S. border from Mexico — the part of the border without a wall — and was detained by U.S. officials. He had no passport and couldn’t explain why he was in Mexico in the first place.
The Americans ordered his deportation back to Somalia, but instead, he skipped out on bail and made his way up to America’s other border — where he once again crossed illegally.
He was detained by Canadian officials, and made an asylum claim that was eventually successful.
Why did Canada let him stay? Why did we award refugee status to a man who had previously broken immigration laws?
As part of my investigation into this case, I spoke to a former senior official with the department of public safety, who told me this man should not have been admitted into Canada.
Even though Sharif had no passport and used a different name when making his refugee claim in Canada, our biometric screening system is designed to identify such individuals and to stop foreign criminals from moving within the Five Eyes security network.
To my surprise, in response to my report on this case, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety Mark Holland wrote a letterto the Toronto Sun taking issues with my column and explaining why Sharif was able to stay.
“Sharif’s identity was indeed confirmed by CBSA through both biometrics and biographical information,” he wrote.
So why did we let this illegal migrant, who is now on trial for an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack, into our country?
Holland stated, in no uncertain terms, “your admissibility to another country does not affect your ability to enter Canada or make an asylum claim.”
There you have it. A Canadian politician has stated its policy to ignore the immigration status of would-be migrants coming from our neighbour and closest ally.
We’ve quietly become a sanctuary country.
As the U.S. cracks down on dangerous criminals who entered their country illegally, Canada has once again become a potential safe haven for illegal migrants, foreign criminals and even terrorists.
A new poll suggests that more Canadians are going into 2019 feeling worse about their finances than the years before.
Despite
the Trudeau government’s plan to “grow the middle class, and help those
working hard to join it,” the number of Canadians who would call their
financial position “good” hit a three year low, according to the Ipsos
Reid poll.
When broken down regionally, it shows Alberta feeling the worst.
Of the metrics used by Ipsos to measure if 2018 was “good to them,” Alberta scored the worst.
This includes their job, their family, their retirement plans and the economy in general.
The poll suggests that the number of Canadians who feel “good” about their finances dropped by 9 percent from 2017.
It also found that the number of Canadians who felt good about their savings decreased by 6 percent from the year prior.
Along with uneasy feelings about 2018, Canadians’ feelings towards 2019 are even more negative than the year prior.
With the federal carbon tax going
into effect this year, meaning Canadians will have to pay an additional
tax on carbon, 2019 will be a very expensive year for Canadians.
“Canadians are giving a more
pessimistic forecast for 2019 than they did heading into 2018 a year
ago, reflecting a general souring of attitudes,” stated the Ipsos
report.
The reasons? Ipsos polling suggests
that “Canadians think they will be paying more for food, housing, health
and wellness, transportation and debt repayments in 2019.”
Debt repayment is likely going to be a big concern for Canadians.
While the federal government is running a $19 billion deficit — with no apparent plan to balance the books anytime soon — dealing with debt is the number one financial priority for Canadians in 2019.
Another reason for the troubling
Canadian economy in 2019 is the weakened Oil and Gas sector. The
Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, believes low oil prices are causing strain on the economy as a whole.
Poloz expects investment in the energy sector to decline further in 2019.
That explains the pessimism in Alberta.
Canceled pipelines, banning oil tankers and controversial legislation have all contributed to a disgruntled and vocal oil and energy sector in Alberta.
Lowered optimism in the economy may spell trouble for the Trudeau government going into an election year.
Canadian border officers granted illegal immigrants from the U.S. legal entry into Canada.
Individuals like Elidee Sanchez, who spent 17 years living in the United States illegally, are being given temporary visas and permission to stay in Canada.
Sanchez was aided by her immigration
lawyer and was permitted entry into Canada through a student visa, this
despite her illegal alien status in the U.S.
Illegally entering an allied country,
and staying in that country for years illegally, no longer prevents
someone from being eligible to come to Canada.
This government policy sets a
dangerous precedent for those evading U.S. immigration authorities and
sends the message that Canada is soft on immigration security.
Take the case of Abdulahi Hasan Sharif,
a Somali man with ISIS sympathies who ran over five people in Edmonton
and stabbed a police officer in an unprovoked terror attack in 2017.
Sharif illegally entered the U.S.
from Tijuana, Mexico and was ordered by a judge to be deported in 2011.
Instead, he skipped a court date and made his way into Canada in 2012
where he received refugee status.
As reported
in 2017 by True North founder Candice Malcolm in the Sun newspaper
chain, the federal government knowingly admits criminals like Sharif
into Canada.
Here’s what Malcolm wrote about the situation 16 months ago:
I spoke to a senior source,
formerly with the public safety department, who told me our biometric
screening system — which uses eye scans, fingerprints and a live photo —
is designed to stop foreign criminals from moving within the Five Eyes
security network.
Even if Sharif had no passport,
as was reported, and even though he provided a slightly different name
when entering Canada, our system should have identified him and stopped
him from entering our country.
But the system didn’t do that, and so my question to the government was simple: Why not?
Well, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety Mark Holland answered my question in a letter to the editor.
He let it be known that “Sharif’s identity was indeed confirmed by CBSA through both biometrics and biographical information”.
But Holland also stated that “your admissibility to another country does not affect your ability to enter Canada or make an asylum claim.”
In other words, Canada knew Sharif
had entered the U.S. illegally. We knew he had a deportation order from
the U.S., and we knew he was violating the terms of his deportation by
showing up in Canada.
And yet, we let him into Canada anyway.
Why is Canada turning a blind eye to
individuals who were considered illegal aliens to our neighbour and
closest ally? Malcolm continues, describing a Trudeau government
official’s pitiful defence for letting an illegal alien who would become
a terrorist into Canada:
Holland justifies this decision
by noting “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a
statement saying that he ‘had no known criminal history at the time of
his encounters with ICE.’”
Common sense tells us it’s
possible Sharif had no known criminal history because he came from
Somalia, a country with no viable government and thus no one to keep
track of crimes.
Since arriving in North America —
via Mexico, for some unknown reason — Sharif entered the U.S.
illegally, failed to show up for his immigration hearing and skipped the
country to come to Canada.
Are those not crimes that would make one inadmissible to Canada? Apparently not.
Holland stated all this, and
then, without realizing the irony of his statement, said, “But Canadians
can rest assured that our border controls are robust and effective.”
Effective at what?
In this case, federal officials
knowingly let a suspicious young man with a questionable past into the
country, where he’s now alleged to have done tremendous harm.
If an individual is willing to break
the law in a neighboring country, it shouldn’t be a surprise when they
don’t respect the laws of our own nation.
Instead of tackling the issue of
illegal entry into Canada, the federal government seems intent on
providing legitimacy to those who wish to circumvent immigration laws.
Justin Trudeau said it is “dangerous” to blame his immigration policy for crimes committed by the immigrants he welcomed into Canada.
At a recent town hall
in Kamloops, British Columbia, Trudeau also said that looking at crimes
committed by refugees and migrants was not “helpful or useful” in
Canada’s multicultural society.
An audience member asked the Prime
Minister about the murder of a 13-year-old girl, allegedly at the hands
of Syrian refugee, and raised his concerns about the safety of Canadians
amidst Trudeau’s open border policies.
“In an interview you did with Macleans, the interviewer said, ‘a lot of people say that if it hadn’t been for the surge in Syrian refugees after the 2015 election, this guy would not be here.’ To which you replied, ‘I’m not one of those people who said that,’” said the audience member.
“My question is, can you guarantee
that Marrisa Shen was not killed by a Syrian refugee who came to Canada
after you were elected. And if not, what in your opinion is the
acceptable number of Canadian lives lost as a result of your policies on
refugees?”
“I told you we were going to hear
from a wide range of perspectives here,” quipped Trudeau in response to
this heartfelt question.
“The generalizations and the danger
that we get into when tying things like immigration policies to
incidents like this is something that I don’t entirely know is helpful
or useful in a diverse, pluralistic, inclusive society like ours.”
“To set up a false dichotomy that
says, well part of everything we need to do to keep Canadians safe is to
keep people from away out of this country, is simply not the way we are
as Canadians” added the Prime Minister.
Marrisa Shen was raped and murdered in cold blood in a park near her home in Burnaby, B.C. in July 2017.
She was just 13-years-old when this
horrific crime took place. Police have stated it was a random attack,
and that Shen did not know the man who attacked her.
Ibrahim Ali, 28, has been charged with her murder.
Ali came to Canada as a refugee from
Syria just three months earlier. While the Trudeau government had a
specific policy to exclude single, military-aged men like Ali from our
Syrian refugee resettlement program, Ali still managed to come to Canada
with his extended family.
In 2016, months before Ali came to Canada, Trudeau defended his decision to bring 25,000 Syrians to Canada on a rushed timeline during an interview with 60 Minutes.
The American interviewer raised a
question that few Canadian journalists have ever had the chance to ask
our Prime Minister. She asked if he was worried about the possibility of
one of Trudeau’s Syrian refugees carrying out a terrorist attack.
“I am more than comfortable that…
accepting 25,000 Syrian refugees does right by both the safety of
Canadians and by the values that define us as a nation,” said Trudeau.
In the same 60 Minutes interview, Trudeau said he believed his approach was superior to the immigration policies of President Trump.
“Ultimately being open and respectful
towards each other is a much more powerful way to diffuse hatred and
anger than … big walls and oppressive policies.”
The Shen murder trial is still in its initial phases, and True North will continue to report on any updates to this case.
Toronto’s temperature plummeted from mild, above-freezing temperatures throughout the first three days of the week to a damp, bitter minus 11 degrees Celcius by Thursday evening as a steady stream of homeless Torontonians filed into the city’s largest homeless shelter, filling its capacity of over 600 beds.
Seaton House, located on 339 George Street — just blocks away from the old Maple Leafs Garden and Eaton Centre — was supposed to be shuttered back in 2017, but has had its life prolonged due to a lack of funds to replace its beds elsewhere and a growing demand for shelter from those without homes.
“I just got converted to refugee [claimant status] a few months ago,” says one middle-aged man staying at Seaton House in a wheelchair who came from Africa (he wouldn’t tell me which country he’s from) and entered Canada through Roxham Road. “I’m working with my social worker in getting an apartment… We just started with the apartment searching, so very soon we should be able to get something.”
“I’m getting a lot of help from the Canadian government,” he says, as well as support from the provincial government’s Ontario Disability Support Program. “Canada is a very good place, I’m feeling good here.”
“It’s the way people are doing [it], a lot of people are doing it so I just have to follow the way,” said the man about how he decided to come to Canada through Roxham Road.
“I had a cane to come here. When I got here I never knew there was something like a chair to move around… I was able to get an [electric] wheelchair from the government.”
Most of the new demand on Toronto’s shelter system has come from people irregularly (i.e. illegally) entering the country at much higher rates over the past two years.
Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted out an invitation in early 2017 to the world’s estimated 65 million displaced people “fleeing persecution, terror & war” and hundreds of millions of others in abject poverty, the number of people illegally and legally entering Canada to claim refugee status has shot upfrom a total of 23,875 in 2016, to 50,390 in 2017, to 51,165 in the first 11 months of last year (December’s number has yet to be released).
Of course, US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and restricting of legal immigration have been contributing factors to the influx into Canada from the border, but there are also thousands of Nigerians flying to America on visitor visas each month, with many of them then proceeding to enter Canada at the unofficial entry point at Quebec’s Roxham Road to claim refugee status. From there, with the help of the Trudeau government, many are relocating to Toronto because they know some English, not French.
In Nigeria, there is real danger for many citizens from the ongoing decade-long conflict between the government and the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram. But there is also undoubtedly a subset of those seeking refugee status in Canada that are less drawn to Canada by fears for their lives than for economic and health reasons.
Hearings at the Immigration and Refugee Board last year showed only slightly more than half of those illegally entering Canada are deemed legitimate refugees, but it’s taking an average of nearly two years for their backlogged cases to be heard. Only one in every 200 rejected claimants were being deported back in 2017 according to the Globe and Mail. The Canadian Press revealed this week that IRB employees believe the agency is woefully underfunded to process the surging number of claimants.
Provinces and cities affected by the influx of tens of thousands of additional asylum seekers annually have complained that the Trudeau government is offloading the hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs onto them.
Back at Seaton House at dusk on Thursday, there is small group of loud local individuals across the street who appear to be high on drugs, staying at a respite facility (a temporary shelter) directly across from Seaton House. That facility opened a year ago after the province offered the former youth detention centre to the city to help alleviate the then overwhelmed shelter system from the first major influx of refugee claimants.
Fresh vomit is splattered on the sidewalk next to where I’m interviewing another homeless man. Most arrive at one of the two facilities by foot, but several cabs arrive in the two hours I’m there to drop off individuals staying at the shelters. Others that appear to be refugees decline to speak with a journalist.
“Even with the security there, or whatever, and still people try to come around and sell fentanyl… and [people are] smoking crystal meth,” says Khalid Shait, 50, who immigrated to Canada in 1990 from Pakistan. He has been staying at Seaton House since December 12 and says he’s been off fentanyl for three weeks.
“A lot of people I think [are migrants]. They’ve got refugee status … and some of them have deportation orders on them,” he says.
“On this side [points to the left side of the building], there aren’t many migrants, they’re usually ex-cons, drunks, and drug addicts. But on the other side, in principle, it’s supposed to be for refugees,” says another homeless man who has been living at Seaton for the past six months. He says the facility is “consistently” full.
A Seaton House employee in a phone call later that evening confirmed that the homeless shelter was at maximum capacity, and usually is, but would not disclose how many people had been turned away to find shelter elsewhere.
“This is the fifth straight year the City has increased the number of spaces available at 24-hour respite sites,” said Shelter, Support and Housing Administration spokesperson Greg Seraganian. “Currently, there are 805 spaces across nine 24-hour respite sites, with more available as contingency space. Although the shelter system is operating at high occupancy, we are confident we will have sufficient spaces for all who need them this winter.”
“As of January 9, 2019, almost 40 per cent of all shelter users in the City’s system were refugee/asylum claimants.”
Sereganian also said there are “approximately 18 to 20 new refugee/asylum claimants entering the shelter system each day.”
Last fall, the City of Toronto proactively bought 3 portable respite facilities in anticipation of another year of increased demand. The City was also looking to buy a hotel to house refugees.
The Trump administration still intends to deport over 300,000 people currently living in the US under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, the bulk of them are set to be deported in 2019. 46,000 Haitians are set to lose their TPS status on July 22 (Canada likewise suspended a similar program for Haitians in 2016) and 195,000 El Salvadorians are set to lose theirs on September 9.
Some experts, such as Calgary-based immigration lawyer Raj Sharma, believe that this could potentially lead to an even bigger spike in asylum seekers coming to Canada this year, which would only further exhaust the resources of the shelter system in Toronto.
Repeated polls show a majority of Canadians believe their country is too generous to newcomers. If the influx rapidly increases at the same time the Trudeau government does nothing to close the loophole on so-called irregular immigration, all while an even bigger spike in refugee claimants appears inevitable, illegal border crossings could become a defining issue in the 2019 federal election.
Socialism is a failed experiment. In every iteration, across the globe and throughout history, it ends the same way.
But this hasn’t stopped many on the Left from pushing for socialism in Canada. It’s honestly bizarre that we still take socialism seriously; even educated Canadians still advocate for it.
One only needs to look at Venezuela to see how socialism has been such a crushing failure.
Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s. Its produced more than 10 percent of the world’s crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its neighbours. However, at the turn of the millennium, Venezuela became a socialist country and ever since it’s citizens have been plunged into poverty and food shortages.
Out of touch celebrities like Sean Penn and Michael Moore have naively praised Venezuela in the past. Today, thanks to its socialist policies, Venezuela is facing a refugee crisis and millions of citizens are fleeing the country.
After Hugo Chavez’s reign, his successor Nicolas Maduro took over power and doubled down on Chavez’s disastrous socialist policies.
Venezuela’s GDP is sinking at a rapid rate and inflation is through the roof.
Under Maduro’s watch, dozens of protestors were killed while hundreds were injured during anti-government demonstrations as reported by UN Human Rights Watch
Due to socialist policies, consumer inflation rose by 800% in 2016
75% of Venezuelans have lost 19 pounds in weight according to the National Survey of Living Conditions
Over 1/3rd of the country are eating no more than two meals a day
A survey conducted by the country’s National Assembly found that Venezuelan hospitals are in such a terrible condition that 79% have no running water
The same survey found that pregnancy-related deaths rose by 66% since 2016 due to lack of basic medical supplies
The country has become a hotbed for the spread of disease. It is currently facing a Malaria epidemic as cases have tripled by 2013. Alongside the vast quantity of migrants leaving the country, Venezuela is a source for the spread of diphtheria and measles throughout South America and beyond.
President Maduro raised minimum wage continuously up to 58% in 2018 to battle inflation with no success
Energy sector workers and supporters
are planning a massive convoy of vehicles to Ottawa to protest the
federal government’s attacks on their sector.
It
is expected that hundreds of transport trucks and personal vehicles
will join the convoy along the way from Western Canada to Ottawa.
The convoy is set to leave Alberta
and British Columbia on February 14th, where it will meet up with
another convoy from Atlantic Canada, then make its way to Parliament
Hill for a massive rally.
The convoy’s GoFundMe page has gotten over $83,000 in donations as of January 8.
According to their GoFundMe
page, the goals of the convoy include putting people back to work,
ending dependency on foreign oil, ending the Carbon Tax and seeing more
pipelines approved.
The purpose of the GoFundMe is to help cover the costs of gas for the demonstrators.
The account says,“a 12 person admin
panel with certified accountants has been set up oversee organizing,
strategy and disbursement of fuel cards.”
Low prices and not enough energy
infrastructure have caused serious problems for the industry, with even
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calling the situation a crisis.
Many within the convoy believe the Trudeau government is working directly against the interests of the energy sector.
The Trudeau Government enacted Bill
C-48, which introduced a ban on oil tankers off the northern coast of
British Columbia, including many key ports that could get Alberta oil to
Asian markets.
The government then passed Bill C-69,
which changes the way pipeline projects are improved and will make it
all but impossible to approve major projects in Canada. The bill
cynically injects “sex and gender” into the considerations for
pipelines, and allows special interests groups to hijack the
consultation stage.
Bill C-69
injects “sex and gender” into the considerations for pipelines, and
allows special interests groups to hijack the consultation stage.
Glen Carritt, the Executive Director of the Convoy project, has had enough.
He told BNN Bloomberg that “the industry has woken up. We’re just tired of our product getting slammed.”
“We have a great product that gets hammered again and again by environmentalists because they can.”
As the Alberta economy continues to
be hit by low oil prices around the world and pipeline difficulties at
home, demonstrations have become frequent.
One rally in Alberta recently attracted over 1000 vehicles.
But nothing as ambitious as a convoy to Ottawa has been attempted yet.
Jason Nixon, a UCP MLA who spoke to the crowd
at a rally in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, on December 29, made it
clear that the solution is more pipelines, and slammed Trudeau’s recent $1.6 billion aid package to the energy sector.
“Trudeau, we don’t want your money. We want you to get out of the way.”
The February demonstration expects to see over 700 vehicles.
Sometimes it’s the little stories that tell you all you need to know.
Here’s
a headline from The Canadian Press that pretty much sums up everything
that’s both right and wrong with our current enviro craze:
“Sales of electric cars soar but Canada still nowhere near 500,000 goal set in 2009.”
You’ve got to love the tone.
We’re always treated like toddlers
whenever it comes to anything “green.” Like when your kid eats just one
spoonful of vegetables so you give them positive feedback but then point
out they still have a whole plate to go.
Then again it’s true that the kids
should be eating their full plate of veggies. But is it true that
consumers should have bought 500,000 electric cars by now? What is this
so-called goal? Who set it?
The story explains: “The 2009
Electric Vehicle Technology Road Map for Canada, produced by a panel of
experts in part for the Department of Natural Resources, aimed for
500,000 cars with the hope of galvanizing industry to make and sell them
and government to encourage people to buy them.”
My first guess was that this panel
would have been made up of the various academic and activist
eco-boosters who randomly come up with ridiculous targets that they then
use to bully us into complying with for the sake of meeting those
targets that the public never agreed to in the first place (Can anyone
say Kyoto? Or Paris?).
But I was wrong.
There’s actually a sizeable steering
committee made up not of activists but of industry execs. And why would
industry execs make wildly inaccurate predictions about the free market?
Because this report is really just them and the government telling
people to buy a whole lot of their products.
Obviously people selling e-vehicles
will sign on to a government report telling people to buy e-vehicles. So
it’s hard to blame them.
The very next sentence of the story though shows they’ve got nothing to complain about:
“Although more electric cars were
sold in Canada in 2018 than in the previous three years combined, they
still accounted for about two per cent of the vehicles sold overall and
there are only about 100,000 of them on the road.”
Okay… so what’s going on is
Canadians are buying way more electric cars than before, just not the
pie in the sky projections set a decade ago.
This ought to be cause for
celebration, both for the industry people and the activists. Tripling
their numbers! Who can argue with that? I’m also willing to wager that
there’s no way the various internal projections that these companies put
together was anywhere near as optimistic as the government report.
This tells us something that I’ve
been harping on about for several years now, especially in light of
Trudeau’s stubborn fixation with the carbon tax. And that is that there
is pretty much zero connection between what the government does on these
issues and what happens in the real world.
Seriously. Did any one single individual buy an e-vehicle because of this 2009 government target? Doubtful.
Once these companies actually build a
product people want — something reliable and practical at a price they
can afford — then maybe this idea will take off.
But there is no government target or
edict or green scheme handout or amount of tsk-tsking from Catherine
McKenna that will make Canadians want to buy a car that doesn’t work for
their lifestyle.
I’ve just finished the great
historian Niall Ferguson’s new book The Square and The Tower, a
whirlwind tour of world history from the perspective not of specific
people and big events, but associations and networks.
Ferguson’s main message is that networks can adapt more quickly than hierarchies.
So while Trudeau and the other green
scheme boosters in government no doubt see themselves as cutting edge,
the truth is that bureaucracies are the worst type of hierarchies. They
adapt to change worse than anything else. They’re always the last to
bring about innovations like, to take just one example, accepting 21st
century forms of payment to cover your property taxes and library fines.
This Canadian Press story is a
cautionary tale for not just why the government shouldn’t be in the
business of setting random projections, but why it needs to completely
overhaul its approach to future innovations like green issues.
Want the green revolution? Cool. Then
lower the taxes and regulations the companies face and otherwise get
the hell out of the way. But if you think for one second you can
engineer outcomes from your disconnected ivory tower, you’ve got another
thing coming.
As much as elites love to lecture
everyday people from the windows of their private jets, there’s
increasing evidence that we don’t need top-down edicts to improve the
planet.
Keep in mind that the U.S. pulled out
of the Paris Climate Accord in 2017 and despite the hysteric
condemnation from the world’s eco-activists, after leaving Paris the
U.S. managed to reduce its national carbon emissions. In fact, carbon
emissions south of the border went down further than most of the
accord’s signatories.
In other words, we don’t need to sign
on to some expensive international gabfest to build the communities we
want to live in. Imagine if the climate alarmists spent their time, say,
researching more durable e-vehicle batteries or picking up garbage in
the park than building elaborate schemes and setting unrealistic targets
for the rest of us.
An Egyptian man is suing the federal government for $34 million for
supposedly violating his rights, plus an additional $3.4 million in
punitive damages, according to a report in the National Post.
For 17 years, the feds have been trying to deport the man, named Mahmoud Jaballah, over his alleged terror ties.
Despite the best efforts of our security and intelligence community,
our leftist courts repeatedly dismissed evidence tying Jaballah to
various terrorists and terror attacks on the basis of how the
information was collected.
In Canada, it always seems like the rights and freedoms of terrorists comes first.
The lawsuit and the failed court cases are just the tip of the iceberg, however, when it comes to the absurdity of this case.
Back in 1996, Jaballah and his family used fake passports from Saudi
Arabia to come to Canada. They lied and took advantage of our
generosity.
When the family arrived, they admitted that they were Egyptian asylum
seekers and filed for refugee status. Their claim was based on the fact
that they said they would be persecuted by the Egyptian government if
they were to be deported.
Unlike many bona fide refugees fleeing Egypt at the time, the
Jaballah family were not Coptic Christians or members of the persecuted
Jewish community.
They weren’t part of an ethnic minority nor were they religious
dissidents who had contradicted barbaric apostasy or blasphemy laws.
No no. The reason Jaballah said he could not return to Egypt was
because the Egyptian government believed he was part of al Qaeda.
You know, the notorious terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden
that just five years later crashed planes into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 innocent civilians and dozens of
Canadians. That al Qaeda.
He was an alleged refugee because he was an alleged terrorist.
Rather than sending Jaballah back on the first plane to Cairo, remarkably, Canada let him stay.
This despite the fact that his own country accused him of being linked to terrorists engaged in a covert war against the West.
Thankfully, not everyone in the federal government was as naive as
those in the immigration department who let him stay. Canada’s
intelligence agency, CSIS, immediately started investigating Jaballah.
By tapping his phone and surveilling his whereabouts, CSIS was able
to gather enough evidence to claim he was a national security threat to
Canada. He was arrested in 1999 through a national security certificate —
a tool used to deport non-citizens who are deemed to be a threat to
national security.
The federal courts, however, dismissed the certificate and Jaballah
was let go. He was arrested again in 2001, and this time held for
several years following 9/11. In 2007, however, the use of national
security certificates was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,
and Jaballah was once again set free.
In 2008, he was arrested again, this time over the allegation he was
tied to the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa that killed 200
people. He was held but once again set free due to technicalities in how
the evidence was gathered.
For over 20 years, Jaballah has managed to stay in Canada despite the continued and best efforts of the government of Canada.
Now, he’s suing us for $37 million.
This case demonstrates everything wrong with our legal and our immigration system.
