Glavin: Canada can no longer skirt the ‘foreign fighter’ problem

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It’s been almost 4 years because the federal authorities embarked upon a technique of elaborate excuse-making and transparently bogus alibis to dodge the implications of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s high-drama 2015 election proclamation that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,” however in the end: time’s up.

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It in all probability isn’t the final time the federal authorities will try a deft sideways transfer within the matter of the captured Canadian psychopaths whose care and feeding was conveniently offloaded onto the Kurdish resistance fighters who led the bloody drawn-out battle in 2019 that crushed the final key redoubt of the fear warlord Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s al-Qaida offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL).

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However the authorities gave it one other shot final week within the case earlier than the federal court docket’s Justice Henry S. Brown, and it didn’t work. It was a pretty slam-dunk case to the impact that the federal authorities was sure by regulation to safe the repatriation of 23 Canadian detainees trapped within the camps run by the Kurdish resistance within the rebel-held Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

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On Thursday, Ottawa introduced that repatriation preparations can be made for 19 of them: six ladies and 13 kids. However in a Friday ruling, Choose Brown stated: not so quick. The 4 males are entitled to the identical consideration. The Kurds don’t need them, it’s not the Kurds’ job to be taking care of wayward Canadians, they’re more than pleased to show over the Canadian detainees and the boys have the identical rights as the ladies and kids. They’re entitled to passports or emergency journey paperwork delivered by an official Canadian consultant.

In different phrases, the regulation is the regulation, the prime minister isn’t above it, and Canada can’t simply want away the constitutional rights of the Canadians trapped in Kurdish-held Syria because the siege of Baghuz Fawqani. The federal authorities says it’s reviewing the court docket determination.

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There are all kinds of fascinating debates available about nationwide safety and de-radicalization and encumbrances the Crown might face in securing terrorism convictions in circumstances with proof obscured by the fog of struggle. However the precept stays: “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” That’s the slogan Trudeau aimed on the Conservatives’ Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, which empowered the federal government to strip twin residents of their Canadian citizenship upon conviction for spying, treason or terrorism offences.

“I’ll provide the quote so that you just guys can jot it down and put it in an assault advert someplace,” Trudeau stated at a city corridor in Winnipeg, “that the Liberal Occasion believes that terrorists ought to get to maintain their Canadian citizenship. As a result of I do. And I’m keen to tackle anybody who disagrees with that.” It was all very stirring, and the Conservative citizenship regulation was ultimately overturned.

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However that hasn’t helped the Canadians among the many “ISIL households” in Syria, regardless that none has been lawfully convicted of any terrorism offences, and regardless that most of them are youngsters. Avoiding the embarrassment of getting to reside as much as its high-minded citizenship precept has been the Trudeau authorities’s complete technique in these circumstances.

The primary check concerned the five-year-old orphan Amira, whose dad and mom and siblings had been killed in the course of the siege of Baghuz Fawqani. Amira made it dwelling in October, 2020, however solely as a result of she’d turn into a humiliation to the federal government. Amira’s kin in Toronto had waged a public marketing campaign that pulled on the heartstrings, and he or she was the named plaintiff in a looming court docket case that threatened to crumple what Human Rights Watch referred to as the Trudeau authorities’s unearned “heat and fuzzy” repute as a champion of worldwide regulation.

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A couple of months later one other youngster made it to Canada. The four-year-old lady was privately rescued with the assistance of the crusading former American diplomat Peter Galbraith, who managed to get the lady throughout the border into Iraq from al Roj, a Kurdish-run detention camp housing almost 800 of the “ISIL households” in Syria’s Tigris River Valley. A couple of months after that, Galbraith delivered the kid’s Canadian mom to authorities on the Canadian consulate in Erbil, in Northern Iraq, so Canada had no selection however to take her.

All alongside, the Trudeau authorities’s excuse has been that Canada has no embassy in Syria, and it could be too harmful to ship diplomats to al Roj, the camp the place many of the remaining Canadian residents are being held. However al Roj is a 20-minute journey by minibus from the Iraqi border on the Tigris River. Support employees make the journey routinely.

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Issues started to vary final 12 months when two Canadian ladies had been formally and quietly repatriated.

The American-Canadian Kimberley Polman, a Mennonite-raised mom of three grownup kids who travelled to Syria to marry a Trinidadian ISIL pen pal, was launched on her personal recognizance in British Columbia on a peace bond that requires her to put on an ankle monitor and adjust to quite a lot of restrictions.

Oumaima Chouay and her two kids had been repatriated concurrently, however Chouay was charged with a number of terrorism offences: leaving Canada to take part in terrorist exercise, participation within the actions of a terrorist group, offering providers for terrorist functions, and conspiracy. Three weeks in the past, Chouay was granted bail with situations much like Polman’s.

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Among the many 4 males is “Jihadi Jack” Letts, a twin British-Canadian whose dad and mom say is an “idealistic” and “compassionate” Muslim convert and sufferer of obsessive-compulsive dysfunction who despises ISIL.

Letts’s household was represented by counsel Barbara Jackman within the federal court docket case. The opposite males, not named, are represented by human rights lawyer Lawrence Greenspon.

It’s not identified whether or not Mississauga’s Mohammad Ali, an ISIL sniper, is amongst them. Ali is believed to be the identical “Ali” that the Public Prosecution Service of Canada has already ready terrorism costs towards. The boys clearly don’t embrace the Saudi-born Canadian Mohammed Khalifa, from Toronto, who was turned over to the FBI and sentenced to life in jail final 12 months by a choose in Virginia after pleading responsible to terrorism costs. Khalifa was particularly infamous for narrating a video depicting the beheading of American journalist James Foley.

So by all means, let’s have a jolly good debate about what to do with these “international fighters” and their kids. However let’s not fake that it isn’t Canada’s duty to get them sorted.

Terry Glavin is an creator and journalist.