WhatFinger


The government no longer helps all Canadians in trouble abroad

Prisoners of ambiguity



The Economist print edition UNTIL recently, Canadians who ended up in a foreign jail could be confident of help. The federal government backed any request by a convicted prisoner to be repatriated to a Canadian jail. For those sentenced to death, an appeal for clemency was automatic. While consular officials would not interfere in any reputable prosecution, once sentence was passed, they would help bring Canadians home.

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Stephen Harper's Conservative government has changed this. In November Stockwell Day, the minister of public safety, said he would not ask the governor of Montana in the United States to commute a death sentence against Ronald Smith, who killed two Americans during a drunken road trip in 1982. In future, no appeal would be made where Canadians were convicted by due process in a democratic country, he said. Mr Harper says intervening on behalf of double murderers sends the wrong signal to Canadians. Maybe, but there are also pitfalls in the new approach. Governments receiving official representations—such as Saudi Arabia, where Mr Day appealed for clemency in the case of Mohamed Kohail, sentenced to beheading for killing a teenager in a 2007 schoolyard brawl—will now know that Canada considers their justice system unfair. Some Canadians reckon that their government has become complicit in capital punishment, which the country abolished for civilians in 1976. More broadly, rather than providing an equal service to all, the government has begun to pick and choose which among the 1,815 Canadians in foreign jails it will help, complains Gar Pardy, a retired civil servant who drew up the previous consular policy. Brenda Martin, whose trial and conviction for fraud in Mexico received much media coverage in Canada, was whisked home on a government-chartered jet within days of being sentenced. Under Canadian rules, she was promptly freed on parole, having served a third of her five-year sentence. More...


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