Dennis, But this Canadian resignation could well be another tempest in a teapot for all I really know.
Radwanski's resignation came about partly as a result of a revolt by Canadian MPs against the cronyism of the Prime Minister's office and of the Liberal Party, (also known as the permanent Ruling Party).
Radwanskii is abrasive and managed to alienate some of the folk in his office and is apparently not a great administrator.
He also managed to alienate some Cabinet ministers.
As Privacy Commissioner he has been attacking some things which are definitely open to criticism but whoever gets the job after him, unless they are a total time server, will still have to deal with the problem outlined in the following article.
nationalpost.com
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.
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