Sammy's Dot

Wow.

I really am surprised by this; given the clear nation-wide dissatisfaction with the decision to prorogue and Harper’s usual political acuity, I wouldn’t have expected quite such a blunt statement. And now I’m just waiting to hear Harper announce “L’état, c’est moi.”

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper is offering a new wrinkle on his reasons for suspending Parliament – the government can do more important work without MPs sitting in the Commons.”

In fact, it’s possibly true that the government can get more work done without the inconvenience of rowdy Opposition MPs demanding accountability. It’s just, you know, totally contrary to the democratic ideals that most Canadians hold. Parliaments exist to hinder the government in its quest to do whatever it pleases.

Although it’s an interesting new take on small government, I suppose, since the government does pay the MPs.

And moreover, how long will Canadians as a whole have to wait for “our” government to explain how it decides who is and is not deserving of its assistance? I think this is a vital question.

Mohamud is thankfully back in Toronto, and the diplomat who labeled her an “impostor” is, apparently, back in Ottawa, but Lawrence Cannon (who has finally emerged from hiding) says that it could take a month for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Travel to determine what happened. Even if they do, he will not guarantee that the results will be made public (via Dr. Dawg’s Blawg).

Bull.

What conceivable reason could there be, Mr. Cannon, to keep those results secret? Do the people of this country not have a right to know what our officials consider to be a “conclusive investigation”, or to know how often “conclusive investigations” are skipped in favour of summarily rendering our citizens stateless?

Somehow, I suspect that the goal right now is to avoid a costly lawsuit that draws negative attention to the Conservative government, and to Harper, Van Loan, and Cannon in particular. I think that the best way to avoid such a lawsuit is to be upfront and open about the results of the investigation, and to offer and immediate apology and compensation. The investigation is needed, both to give Mohamud some peace and to reassure all Canadians that such a situation will not occur again. But it is very clear now that something went gravely wrong at the Canadian High Commission in Kenya, and there is no need for the government to wait for the results of the investigation to acknowledge that.

It seems like Suaad Hagi Mohamud may still face some undisclosed hurdles to get back to  her home.

According to the Toronto Star,

Nothing in Canadian law stops the government from “picking and choosing” which Canadians it will help and who it will abandon, a former senior diplomat warns.

In the case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Toronto woman who was detained in Kenya for 12 weeks, “overzealous” civil servants chose to abandon her, said former consular services chief Gar Pardy.

What’s worse, he said, is that Ottawa could just say, “`Sorry it happened’ and that’s the end of it” unless somebody ensures there is a “protection of Canadians act.”

That’s outrageous, and I believe it’s clearly true that the levels of support offered to Canadian citizens who are in trouble abroad is widely divergent.

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She is coming home.

However, I won’t be satisfied until I hear something about an apology, and compensation, and preferably a resignation.

I’ve been following the story of Suaad Hagi Mohamud since I first read about her on the Toronto Star in July. It infuriates me.

The short form appears to be: a Somalia-born Canadian citizen, in Kenya to visit her mother, was detained at the Nairobi airport when on her way home to Toronto. Airport security staff felt that she did not ressemble her passport photo, and apparently refused to accept Mohamud’s other identification, including several other pieces of photo ID, and she was not permitted to board her flight; she was held in airport custody for four days and in jail for eight before she was released on bail without travel documents. The Canadian High Commission in Nairobi was contacted.

At this point, in my opinion, events should have gone as follows: the consular officials arrange an interview with Mohamud, ask for references in Canada, and contact those people (it is, as will be described, quite clear that there were people in Canada who could vouch for her identity). Perhaps they examine her identification themselves. Then they help her get home.

Instead, the Canadian officials told the Kenyan authorities that Mohamud was an “imposter”, canceled her passport, and recommended that she be prosecuted; she was charged with fraud.

After the Toronto Star – which, along with the CBC, seems to be one of the few major media sources that has been covering the story at all* – got in contact with Mohamud’s family, including her ex-husband and son, and her work supervisor, among others, and began running articles about her, the government first insisted that she was not who she said she was, then agreed to check her fingerprints against the prints made when she arrived in Canada and made her refugee claim. More delays, and more people came forward in Canada to vouch for Mohamud.Then the Canadian officials said that the prints were no longer on file (“Officials then said they no longer had the file containing Mohamud’s fingerprints, taken during her immigration 10 years ago”, according to the Star. After more stalling, they agreed to a DNA comparison to Mohamud’s son in Canada. However, as of Saturday, “[S]pokespeople for the foreign affairs department and Canada Border Services Agency refused to say if the government would accept DNA tests as proof of identity”.

Our government has been stalling on this matter for two and a half months, while a child in Canada wonders if his mother will come home, and that mother wonders if she will face jail in a foreign country, or have a life to come back to here in Canada. (Incidentally, and disturbingly, no one from the federal government appears to have ever stated that, because people in Canada were asking for their loved one to come home, and they were alleging that the person who said she was that loved one was not, they were looking for her.)

There is no excuse for their stalling, and it must end, now. The results of the DNA test are in. Though DNA does not encode a name, the test results have told us that the woman stranded in Nairobi is the mother of a boy in Canada, whose identity and status as a citizen has also been ascertained. Enough is enough, and the government should recognize that they need to act now. Mohamud and her Canadian lawyer have already had to fight far more than they should have to get government officials to take action on her case, including filing multiple affidavits, providing multiple pieces of identification, and providing numerous references. The Canadian consulate should have new travel documents issued to Mohamud now, and they should pay for an immediate flight back to Toronto.

But the case should not end there. If Canadian citizenship is to mean anything, not one of us should let this go. The Harper government cannot redeem what has been done to Mohamud, and I for one have no doubt at all that it would not have happened to a white woman named Mary Smith.

I want to see a joint statement from both Harper and Lawrence Cannon on the front page of every newspaper in the country tomorrow, acknowledging that Mohamud was treated wrongly. “We wronged you, and we are sorry.” I want to see some indication that the consular officials who decided she was an “imposter” will be fired. Lawrence Cannon should resign from his post as Minister of Foreign Affairs; he is clearly unable to ensure that his department provides appropriate support to Canadian citizens. I want a statement that lays out what they will do in the future to ensure that Canadians in trouble abroad will receive adequate and timely assistance from their government (and without idle speculation from said government that perhaps a hypothesized sister is sharing a Canadian woman’s passport). I want to know how they will ensure that all Canadian citizens, regardless of whether they were born in Canada or are immigrants, regardless of whether they came here as refugees or through the points system, will receive that assistance and support.

I want to know that compensation will be offered to Suaad Hagi Mohamud for the lost time with her son, as well as the lost wages and the money she had to spend to obtain justice from her government for the two and a half months of her ordeal.

Mohamud’s lawyer has said that he will file for a court order to require her to be repatriated tomorrow, if necessary.

The just response is obvious. It shouldn’t take a court order.

*Though Dr. Dawg has, and that’s a blog that I’ll be following.

Let me be clear: I don’t have a lot of respect for the current municipal government in Toronto. I voted for David Miller in 2006, but only as a least-worst choice (I didn’t want to see the other two front runners for mayor, Jane Pitfield and Stephen LeDrew, take office). Royson James has summed up their focus on petty issues at the expense of substantive action on the real issues that are facing the city, and it’s worth a read.

However, John Baird’s “off-the-cuff” remark that “Twenty-seven hundred people got it right. They didn’t. This is not a partnership and they’re bitching at us … They should fuck off…” with respect to Toronto’s request for federal funding for new streetcars? That’s definitely showing off the class I’ve come to expect from the Conservatives.

According to the Star article, Toronto submitted a single request for funds for a fleet of new streetcars, which are very much needed, and the request was rejected because it did not meet the local job creation criteria that were written into the stimulus bill. I think that the criteria were written too narrowly in this case, because although no jobs would be created in Toronto, several hundred jobs would be created at the struggling Thunder Bay Bombardier plant. I would have been quite happy if the city government had included a few other infrastructure projects in their funding application – perhaps including the maintenance facility that is mentioned here – but the streetcars are needed, the deal is already in place, and it would benefit a significant number of people in one of Ontario’s Northern cities. It’s a shame the federal government set such a dogmatic rule to qualify, and so openly expressed their contempt for the city while they were at it.

The rejection of the request for stimulus funds means that the Toronto Transit Commission will not be able to close the deal on the streetcars unless cash is forthcoming from somewhere else (the deal must be funded by June 27), and Thunder Bay will not be able to benefit from the jobs created by the deal.

Mr. Baird, if your party is trying to win seats in this city, you’re doing it wrong.

Rob and I walked up to the front porch tonight, only to exclaim, “what the hell is that?”

An opossum, as it turns out! (Way cuter than the mutant rat that was my first thought.)

Too bad it was munching on foodstuffs that were formerly in our green bin, but still, I’ve never seen an opossum before. I’m going to have to start carrying my camera with me all the time!

As soon as I start to think about parks and conservation, I start to get all tangled up in guilt. Just about everything I’ve read this year that has discussed parks has raised this problem.

I suspect – or at least, I hope – that most of the people advocating for greater conservation in Canada are also wrestling with guilt, because setting aside land is not as simple as it sounds on paper.

Economic impact is an important problem, of course, especially in Canada, where there are still many towns based around a single industry, usually an extractive one. However, the questions about who can access designated parks, and what kinds of activity can be permitted in designated parks (leaving aside logging and mining, both of which are permitted in parks across this country), strikes me as more pernicious, because they are more forgettable. Nonetheless, the way we as a society answer those questions can have a major impact on how much land is protected, and where that land is, and how effective the protection is.

For example, I currently have access to a car, and the financial means to go camping a few times a year; it’s easy for me to visit Ontario’s parks (assuming my designated driver feels like roughing it for a bit, at least). I’m all for designating more lands strictly as parks, with restricted access for camping and hiking and no extractive industry. But I’m lucky, and it’s easy for me to forget that it’s a luxury to be able to agitate for more land to be set aside for me to pursue an activity I enjoy. If I didn’t have the financial means to consider leaving town for a weekend, and easy access to transportation, well, I doubt that it would be important to me whether or not there were public parks available.

Part of the answer to this is that we need to encourage people to think about the ecosystems that are around where they live. In this view, the David Dunlop Observatory lands should be understood to be as important as a place like High Park. Spaces that are in the middle of cities are always going to be more significantly impacted by human activity, but they can still serve as habitats and as nodes in a network of wildlife corridors; they can still be places where indigenous ecosystems can be preserved. The only difference between these two parks is that one is an official park and is not under threat, and one is owned by a developer, and the deer and birds do not pay rent.

It’s still important to agitate for strong protection of undeveloped wilderness, but I think that part of the answer to the problem of who is able to enjoy nature is to remember that nature is all around us, if we permit it to be. We need to petition for a policy to encourage large city parks with a range of natural habitats, linked wherever possible by greenbelts.

The Canadian government is doing a poor job of representing our country at the UN climate change conference in Poznan: dishonesty seems to be our specialty. According to the Toronto Star:

Michael Martin, Canada’s ambassador for climate change and the country’s chief negotiator at the conference, denies obstructionism, saying Canada is playing a constructive role.

Michael Martin apparently has an idiosyncratic definition of “constructive”.

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Now that I’ve more or less stopped fuming over the proroguement of Parliament, I want to get down my thoughts about the Bloc Quebecois and the perception of their place in the coalition.

I don’t agree with the Bloc’s goal of sovreignty for Quebec, and I think the Bloc is incorrect in their argument that sovreignty will improve the situation of the the Quebecois both on the world stage and in North America. I think that despite the intense regionalism across Canada, most of our individual regions are stronger together than they are separately.

This is illustrated particularly strongly in some of the Bloc’s campaign material. In this pamphlet (PDF), for example, although every section ends with a declaration that things would be better in a sovereign Quebec, the platform consists almost entirely of asking for federal funding from Ottawa while demanding that Ottawa allow Quebec greater freedom to chart its own path.

Demanding a raise of federal transfers for post-secondary education (college and university) and social programs of 2.75 billion $ over three years for Quebec.

…

Continuing to demand the abolition of loopholes in the income tax system allowing Canadian businesses to pay less than they should by settling in Barbados, a tax haven.

…

Becoming the relay to the federal government of the initiatives coming from within that are common ground in Quebec’s regions.

Despite their advocacy of Quebec sovreignty, it’s pretty clear that the Bloc Quebecois is now essentially a regional party, dedicated to promoting their province at the federal level. This can be grating for the rest of Canada when it seems as though the Bloc is arguing that Quebec is special and the rest of us are not, but it is hardly treasonous, particularly when the requirements for separation from the country are now written into law.

But by insisting that any government which is supported by the Bloc officially is of necessity illegitimate, the Conservatives are not just reopening a painful debate about whether or not Quebec should separate. They are arguing that a party with a great deal of support within Quebec, and strong representation in the House of Commons, essentially does not count because of their sovreignist platform. It cannot be repeated enough that support for sovreignty is not illegal, and is not illegitimate. I may not like that platform, but I don’t think that calling the Bloc the devil is going to lure its supporters to me. I think that it’s quite likely that the Bloc will actually be strengthened in the next election by the not unjustified feeling that the rest of Canada is ganging up on Quebec and discounting the status of their elected representatives. This will make it hard for any party to gain a majority in Parliament, and makes it all the more important for politicians to take the long view and remember that they will be working together for the foreseeable future.

As a group, we Canadians need to work harder on reaching across our regional and linguistic divides. I dislike the Bloc’s intense regionalism because it works to strengthen those divides. I would argue that the solution is for our members of Parliament to acknowledge the importance of regional advocacy and to recognize that we have many common fears and hopes across regions as well.

I’ll end by saying that, as an anglophone, my knowledge of Quebec is obviously limited; I’ve visited the province but do not live there. I speak French more or less fluently, and attended French immersion schools, but my analysis of the situation vis-a-vis the Bloc and their position in the House of Commons is coming from the outside. For a position quite different from mine, one could check out this post by AngryFrenchGuy, which argues that Gilles Duceppe is going to be hurt by his willingness to sign on with the NDP and the Liberals. I’m not convinced, particularly after the way Quebec voters perceived the arts funding cuts in the previous election, but his post raises a valid point.