by Klaus Rohrich
September 23, 2004
In the Old West, there used to be entire regions where "bad guys" laid low between jobs. That’s how I think the Dakota Badlands got their name, combined with the fact that the land wasn’t suitable for farming. In the Dakotas, there is a geological feature called "The Wall." It’s a steep cliff that stretches for several miles across the Badlands. This is where "the Hole in the Wall" gang, a notorious gang of killers, hung out.
It seems to me that Canada is rapidly turning into the modern version of the "badlands" as international "bad guys" come here to hide out. Not a day seems to go by without a story in the media of yet another "bad guy" fighting deportation for decades, all at Canadian taxpayer expense.
The most recent "bad guy" to fit this category is Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad, who has been fighting deportation from Canada for the past 16 years. Could anyone venture a guess what this has cost Canadian taxpayers? Mohammad is a retired Palestinian terrorist, who in 1968 participated in an attack on an El al airliner in athens that resulted in the death of one passenger. He was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in jail by the government of Greece, but was sprung by the Greeks in 1970, when six Palestinian terrorists captured a Greek airliner and threatened to blow it up, unless he was released.
Mohammad eventually wound up in Canada in 1987, immigrating under false pretenses. Canadian immigration officials have been trying to deport him since 1988. But like so many others of his persuasion, Mohammad has found that Canada is the land of milk and honey and is loath to leave, especially since his health isn’t so great these days. His most recent appeal to the courts is that deportation would be cruel and unusual punishment, given that Lebanon, the country to which he would be deported, doesn’t have OHIP.
The list of health problems Mohammad rolled out reads like a compendium of diseases, most of which are lifestyle related. So his basic argument is that because he has all these problems he shouldn’t be deported.
another gang of "bad guys" is the Khadr family, whose exploits have made exciting reading over the years. a bomb at the Egyptian embassy in Karachi, fighting on behalf of the Taliban, training the whole family in terrorist tactics, but wanting to return to Canada for health care and welfare. When public outcry demanded they be stripped of their Canadian citizenship, our Prime Minister came up with the lame excuse that it wasn’t legal to do that. Gee, if that’s the case, then why was it legal to strip aging suspected Nazis of their citizenship and deport them? (Not that they shouldn’t have to answer for their crimes)
I don’t wish to convey the impression that all we have is Islamic "bad guys", we also enough other "bad guys" to make for some hair raising stories. For instance, The Tamil Tigers, as well as a number of other groups, most notably Sikh extremists have also bored themselves into Canada’s woodwork. One especially heinous case is that of Manickvasagam Suresh, a known Tamil Tiger terrorist leader who has been fighting deportation from Canada for over 8 years. His "final" hearing is to be held sometime this October to determine whether or not he can stay here.
Not to show favouritism to the eastern hemisphere, we also have a whole passel of "bad guys" from the western hemisphere. Who could forget Clinton Junior Gayle, the killer of Toronto police constable Todd Bayliss, who was under a deportation order at the time he pulled the trigger? In court Gayle claimed that he had to carry a gun as it was an integral part of his occupation as a drug dealer.
If the names George Francis or Lawrence Brown don’t mean anything, then I’m sure that the killing of a young woman named Vivi Lemonis at the Just Desserts restaurant in Toronto does. Like Gayle, Francis and Brown were illegal Jamaican immigrants who had been avoiding deportation through various dodges. Both still reside in Canada, albeit as guests of the Government of Canada at one of our wonderful Penitentiaries.
We’re even attracting "bad guys" from the U.S. Charles Ng, a sexual sadist responsible for the murder of over 10 people, including a baby (!) came to Canada to hide out. When he was discovered and the americans attempted to extradite him back to California where his crimes had been committed, the Canadian government refused to grant extradition unless California guaranteed they would not seek the death penalty. In a moment of utter moral clarity, California’s attorney General refused to make that guarantee and offered to let Canada keep Ng. Ng was finally sent back, as not even the Canadian Government wanted to keep a serial killer with a taste for torture.
One immigration official in a moment of exasperation said that we no longer have control over who can enter Canada. Our propensity to grant asylum to anyone claiming to be a refugee from oppression has made us the target of a plethora of "bad guys" with a desire to ply their badness in the relative safety and comfort of a country whose government seems to lack a moral compass. While so far we have been fortunate, this policy will come back to bite us in the keester some day, when one of the "bad guys" hanging out in these badlands decides to do something really BaD.