Sammy's Dot

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.

The election on 14 October 2008 was probably the most devastating for the Liberal Party of Canada in my lifetime. This has necessarily prompted a great deal of thought within the party about what to do next and how to revitalize the party base, starting with electing a new leader. Unfortunately, the Liberals are starting wrong. (Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Green Party of Canada, and the Liberals are, of course, a rival party. However, since the GPC is not going to be forming a government any time soon, and I for one am not looking forward to a Conservative majority under Stephen Harper, I would appreciate it if the Liberals could form a credible opposition.)

I don’t think that either Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae are bad guys at all. (I don’t imagine Dominic LeBlanc is, either, but I don’t anticipate another surprise leader.) That said, neither one is a good choice for leader. Both of them come prepared with baggage for the Conservatives to attack, and neither really offers much to the Canadian electorate to offset that handicap.

Rae, although his profile in the media suggests that he’s recovered somewhat from his period as Ontario’s NDP premier, is still strongly associated with the recession of the early 90s. All the Conservatives will have to do is say “Remember Rae days?” and watch their numbers soar in the polls, especially with the current economic climate. This isn’t necessarily fair; Rae certainly didn’t cause that recession, and he clearly tried to deal with it without making things harder for people. But that isn’t going to matter. In terms of what he offers, Rae has a long career in public service, and has been the foreign affairs critic since the 2006 elections. However, his work on an education commission and dispute-resolution hasn’t caught much attention, and he doesn’t seem to have sponsored any legislation of his own since becoming an MP. Where does Rae think the country should go? Why should he be running for leader of one of the major parties if he hasn’t already articulated this vision? If he wins, why should Canadians favour his party? It has been obvious for some time now that the Liberal party needs to redirect itself; electing a leader who hasn’t yet expressed what that direction should be, and who is widely disliked in one of the most populous provinces, seems like a bad idea.

Ignatieff, unlike Rae, has very little Parliamentary baggage; he was elected to office for the first time in 2006. He also does not appear to have sponsored any legislation in that time, although he does have a stated position on the economy, the environment, Canada’s role in the world, immigration, and aboriginal issues. However, most of those positions are a statement of what is currently wrong and how things should be, without any statements about how we get there. Say what you will about Stephane Dion‘s carbon tax policy (I note, no longer available from the Liberal website), and his inability to convince Canadians that it is a good idea, at least he stood up and offered a clear solution (even if it isn’t an original idea!) to a major problem. Ignatieff has not done so any more than Rae has, and that is what the Liberals need to shift direction. Besides having relatively little political experience, though Ignatieff is obviously very intelligent, he is also going to be held up as an example of Liberal elitism if he wins. After being out of the country for two decades, he returns and is parachuted into his Etobicoke riding, and a mere two years later he expects to lead the party. The Conservatives will ask, what has he done in his public life in Canada? Why should you vote for a man who didn’t even fight to win his nomination on the ground in his riding, but was offered it by the party leadership?

Stephen Harper has more than enough advantages, given the fact that the Liberals cannot credibly threaten to topple the government until their new leader is elected in May. Rae and Ignatieff do have five months to prove me wrong about them, but I don’t expect that the Conservatives will sit still and wait for one of them to win before they start mounting the attacks. What the Liberal base really needs to do right now is sit down and talk about policy. Rae and Ignatieff both need to start putting out clear proposals for what they want to do and how, and they need to start doing it now. They need to start pushing for the laws that they want in the Commons, and they need to start the dialogue with the party rank-and-file on what kind of party the Liberals should be.