DancingSamurai.ca

First the Kafkaesque circus with Mr. Abdelrazik.

Now for two months Cannon exiled a Canadian citizen, stating she was an ‘impostor’ (despite having multiple pieces of identification claiming she was who she said she was):

Mohamud, 31, spent a month visiting her mother in Kenya and was on her way back to Canada when an officer stopped her at Nairobi airport May 21, saying she did not look like her four-year-old passport photo.

At the crux of the matter was the size of her lips.

After spending eight days in jail she was released on bail with no travel documents.

Canadian consular officials said she was an “impostor,” voided her passport and sent the case to Kenyan authorities for prosecution.

As Mohamud showed various pieces of ID, volunteered fingerprints and garnered the attention of media across the country, the Canadian government maintained their stance that she was not the citizen she claimed to be.

The above quote is from this CTV article, which reveals that DNA now proves her identity, too.

Will the Canadian government apologize, and swiftly bring this Citizen home to her family? What actions will it take to remedy these grossly negligent acts, and ensure no other Canadian citizens are thus wronged?

I’m not holding my breath for sensible answers. But I have posed these questions to the ‘Honourable’ Cannon himself. You can too:

Hill Office:

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6
Tel: (613) 992-5516
Fax: (613) 992-6802
Email: Cannon.L@parl.gc.ca

… sometimes in unexpected ways.

Also, this guy is clearly taking the child safety thing a little too seriously:

Officers said the victim was riding with his wife and had his 3-year-old son in a child seat attached to his bicycle when a driver approached him.

Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road.

Diez pulled a gun and opened fire, hitting the victim in his bicycle helmet, according to police.

(via BoingBoing)

Apparently I’m not alone in thinking the situation of Mr. Abdelrazik is Kafkaesque. In a recent ruling, Federal Appeals Court Judge Zinn had some stern words to say about the Harper government’s treatment of this Canadian citizen (quote via Dawg’s Blog; read the whole Judgment) :

I have found that Canada has engaged in a course of conduct and specific acts that constitute a breach of Mr. Abdelrazik’s right to enter Canada. Specifically, I find:

(i) That CSIS was complicit in the detention of Mr. Abdelrazik by the Sudanese authorities in 2003;
(ii) That by mid 2004 Canadian authorities had determined that they would not take any active steps to assist Mr. Abdelrazik to return to Canada and, in spite of its numerous assurances to the contrary, would consider refusing him an emergency passport if that was required in order to ensure that he could not return to Canada;
(iii) That there is no impediment from the UN Resolution to Mr. Abdelrazik being repatriated to Canada – no permission of a foreign government is required to transit through its airspace – and the respondents’ assertion to the contrary is a part of the conduct engaged in to ensure that Mr. Abdelrazik could not return to Canada; and
(iv) That Canada’s denial of an emergency passport on April 3, 2009, after all of the preconditions for the issuance of an emergency passport previously set by Canada had been met, is a breach of his Charter right to enter Canada, and it has not been shown to be saved under section 1 of the Charter. (68)

I agree with the respondents that a Court should not go further than required when fashioning a remedy for a Charter breach: Doucet-Boudreau v. Nova Scotia (Minister of Education), [2003] 3 S.C.R. 3. In this case, the applicant is entitled to be put back to the place he would have been but for the breach – in Montreal. (68)

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A comment on the Free Range Kids blog has made it to the front page there. I’ll reproduce a snippet here:

“We, as a society, have decided to embrace all fears, and protect against them equally. The issue is twofold: the inability to do reasonable risk assessment on one hand, and the ability to pay for increased levels of vigilance on the other. Where they meet is our current society: people who pay for stuff they don’t need to avoid doing risk assessment, and to avoid upsetting peer standards. The question is, ‘Who benefits?’

Right on! Read the rest.

BTW, Lenore Skenazy’s book Free Range Kids, is available. I’ll have to get a copy myself…

… unfortunately, we Canadians did. More of us need to wake up and realize the Harper government are thinly veiled fascists, and getting more overt by the minute.

First, the immigration minister, Jason Kenney, bans a British MP opposed to the war in Afghanistan (and who has some sharp things to say about Israel’s behaviour) from entering Canada on flimsy ‘terror’ accusations.

Now comes the culmination of a Kafkaesque game being played on Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik by Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon and his higher-ups.
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From the UK:

Two hundred schoolchildren in Britain, some as young as 13, have been identified as potential terrorists by a police scheme that aims to spot youngsters who are “vulnerable” to Islamic radicalisation.

[...]

The programme, run by the Association of Chief Police Officers, asks teachers, parents and other community figures to be vigilant for signs that may indicate an attraction to extreme views or susceptibility to being “groomed” by radicalisers. Sir Norman, whose force covers the area in which all four 7 July 2005 bombers grew up, said: “What will often manifest itself is what might be regarded as racism and the adoption of bad attitudes towards ‘the West’.

(via BoingBoing)

Previously, I mentioned how our society is being ridiculously smothering in a futile effort to ‘protect’ our kids. This is what I mean:

My 10-year-old son wanted the chance to walk from our house to soccer practice behind an elementary school about 1/3 mile from our house. He had walked in our neighborhood a number of times with the family and we have driven the route to practice who knows how many times. It was broad daylight – 5:00 pm. I had to be at the field myself 15 minutes after practice started, so I gave him my cell phone and told him I would be there to check that he made it and sent him off. He got 3 blocks and a police car intercepted him.

[...] They then found me at the soccer field and proceeded to tell me how I could be charged with child endangerment. They said they had gotten “hundreds” of calls to 911 about him walking.

Don’t cops have better things to do? Like, you know, catch real criminals?

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In an editorial on the horrible, bizzare killing of a young man on a Greyhound bus last week, they have this to say:

Notwithstanding one weird and horrifying murder aboard a prairie Greyhound bus last week, this editorial board refuses to be part of the great chain of hysteria that links hyperventilating news consumers, fear-mongering TV producers and pandering politicians. Here is our suggestion for what ought to be done to upgrade the security of bus transportation after the knife killing of Tim McLean by a fellow Greyhound bus passenger: nothing. Leave the system alone. Mr. McLean could have been murdered equally easily by a random psychopath in a movie theatre or a classroom or a wine bar or a shopping mall — or on his front lawn, for that matter. Unless all of those venues, too, are to be included in the new post-Portage la Prairie security crackdown, singling out buses makes no sense.

We propose a fundamental principle to be observed at the outset of this debate: Let’s not try to protect ourselves from crazy people by trying to out-crazy them. (How much happier the world would be now if a few more voices had said so after 9/11.)

Finally, some people with sense! (via Bruce Schneier)