ZGram - 7/5/2003 - "ZUNDEL IS VICTIM OF POLICE STATE TACTICS"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 5, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Ignore the fig leaf - nobody gets published in Canada without the 
obligatory "Zundel is an obnoxious _______" You fill in the blanks. 
That aside, there you have it, in a nutshell:

[START]


Between a police state and an easy mark

George Jonas 
National Post


Wednesday, July 02, 2003

Not too many Canadians have heard of IRPA. The acronym stands for the
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Needless to say, the Orwellian
title doesn't protect immigrants or refugees. It only enables the
Immigration Minister and the Solicitor-General to sign a document called a
"security certificate" which declares a person "inadmissible" in Canada on
security grounds.

Security grounds are vaguely defined to let the authorities cast as wide a
net as possible. They include simply being a "danger to the security of
Canada."

IRPA became law on June 28, 2002. It didn't come out of the blue. Bill C-11
had a complex legislative history going back to the 1970s. In essence, IRPA
is a backlash. It's an effort to exempt Canada's security authorities from
the consequences of certain ultra-liberal trends that prevailed in
immigration laws and practices in the past 30 years.

The law -- which in its current form affects only foreign visitors and
permanent residents, but not Canadian citizens -- enables the authorities
to arrest, hold without bail, and eventually deport a person by satisfying
a single federal judge, on evidence that need not be revealed to the
suspect and his lawyer, at a hearing that neither the suspect nor his
lawyer are entitled to attend, that the detainee is a security risk. Such a
person may be deported even to a place where there's a risk he may be
tortured or killed.

This legislation, which on the face of it appears not only Draconian but
positively Kafkaesque, presents four easily identifiable dangers.

One, since the accusation cannot be tested, the law may be used against
totally innocent people, for reasons ranging from mistaken identity to a
personal vendetta by some informer.

Two, it may be used against people of objectionable views who pose no
security threat even under the wide definitions of IRPA. Officials have a
lousy record when it comes to telling evil-thinkers (or simply politically
incorrect thinkers) from evil-doers.

Three, IRPA can be invoked as a political tool to gain points with segments
of the electorate. In my view, that's what happened recently in the case of
Ernst Zundel, the obnoxious Holocaust denier, who may be a despicable
nuisance but hardly a security threat under any reasonable definition of
the term.

Four, such a law may open the door to a general erosion of due process. If
secret hearings are allowed against suspected terrorist aliens, soon they
may be used against suspected terrorist citizens. There is such a thing as
a slippery slope.

In an article to be published in Maclean's magazine next week, the criminal
lawyer Edward L. Greenspan points out that "in ordinary criminal cases,
following a trial by judge and jury, after being given a full opportunity
to cross-examine one's accusers and question all the government's evidence,
mistakes are still made." It's an essential point. Earlier this year
Illinois Governor George Ryan felt compelled to commute all death row
sentences because newly available DNA evidence revealed an alarming number
of mistaken convictions. Though this was grandstanding -- there was no
evidence that any innocent person had ever been actually put to death in
Illinois, and even Gov. Ryan conceded most of the 156 inmates whose lives
he spared were guilty -- the outgoing governor's gesture underscored the
fact that our legal system isn't sufficiently reliable.

It's easy to see how unreliable the system would be under an IRPA-type
regime, with most ordinary safeguards removed. As the late Mr. Justice
Campbell Grant put it once: "We hold these trials to get at the truth." The
plain-spoken Ontario jurist touched on the heart of the matter. The main
purpose of the legal process is to separate the wheat from the chaff, the
factual from the fanciful, the guilty from the innocent. Justice isn't an
abstraction of liberal philosophy, but something purely practical: Canada's
security won't be enhanced by the incarceration or deportation of people
who did nothing to jeopardize it.

Going on automatic pilot in defence of civil liberties isn't enough,
though. Pretending that we're not at war, that the enemy isn't at the
gates, and that special measures aren't required to combat an acute and
mortal threat, is to continue languishing in ostrich-land. Sticking our
heads in the sand won't protect us against the zealots of anti-globalism,
rabid nationalism, religious fundamentalism, or extreme environmentalism.
The self-righteous fanatics of the world, the masters and instigators of
suicide bombers, self-immolators, rioters, and assassins -- in short, the
terrorists -- have been making a concentrated effort to infiltrate and
destroy the liberal democracies of the West.

For years we've been turning Canada into a safe haven for foreign
terrorists, terrorist recruiters, terrorist bankers, and terrorist
fundraisers. The first thing we may have to do is to take a hard look at
our idea of extending every constitutional protection to aliens. In the
past few decades our tendency has been to reduce the unique status of
citizenship, just as we have been diminishing the unique institution of
marriage. By blurring the distinction between citizens and aliens, as we
have between common-law unions and marriage, we've given an edge to the bad
guys.

For instance, when nasty fanatics fight each other, as they often do, they
love setting up bases for themselves in liberal democracies. The Iranian
mullahs did it when fighting the Shah in the 1970s, and these days the
self-immolating terrorists of the Mujahedeen Khalq do it when fighting the
mullahs. When an alien of this ilk is apprehended in Canada, he'll plead
that deporting him to Iran (or Sri Lanka, or wherever) will expose him to
torture or death -- as it well might. This makes us feel obliged, at least
as often as not, to let him continue using Canada as a safe haven for his
plotting. We shouldn't. We should be able to say to such alien
terror-suspects: "If you'll be tortured, tough cheese. We won't put
Canadians at risk by sheltering the likes of you." Or, if we balk at
sending even a terrorist to his torture or death, we should be able to
offer him a choice between deportation and a life-time tenure in a colony
established for his type somewhere north of Frobisher Bay.

Taking a hard look at ideas such as dual citizenship, reduced waiting
periods, relaxed test requirements, and similar measures, would be a step
in the right direction. It would help ensure that the privilege of
citizenship is meaningful and is extended to people who are content to
abide by the responsibilities that go with it. It would reverse the
blurring of the distinction between aliens and citizens. If we reserved, as
a matter of course, certain constitutional safeguards to citizens, the
necessity for laws such as IRPA would be eliminated. Aliens would know that
a suspicion of being security threats might result in their deportation,
and that a suspicion of disloyalty might eliminate their chances of
acquiring citizenship, along with its constitutional protection.

These are tough questions. They go against the social and legal trends of
the past few decades. But they need to be posed, discussed, and answered if
Canada is not to become either a police state or a staging ground for
international terror.

[END]