Maher Arar

[chickenfeet]

So the report of the inquiry into the deportation of Maher Arar to Syria is in and it exposes bungling, malfeasance, lying and indifference from both the RCMP and the Canadian diplomatic corps. It also gives a passing nod to the practice of torture by Syria and the use of 'extraordinary rendition' by our torture happy neighbours to the south but, quite properly, Mr. Justice O'Connor's report focusses on what went wrong in the Canadian bodies involved.

Both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star have editorials calling for 'heads to roll' but it's already apparent from the government reaction, best summed up as 'not on our shift' and 'we'll get back to you' that nothing is going to happen and, indeed, who would expect it?

What do the charges amount to? Firstly, extreme sloppiness and indifference to human rights by the RCMP in pursuit of sucking up to the US Torture Machine. Well, sucking up to the Americans is the principal function of the entire Canadian security establishment and is fully endorsed, indeed sealed with a loving ass lick, by the Prime Minister. So nothing is going to happen there.

Second, utter incompetence. Well, when has that ever resulted in action being taken against the RCMP? The recent history of the RCMP is one long catalogue of malfeasance and incompetence. Why do anything now?

Third, misleading senior officials and ministers. This is actually the interesting one. The briefings which, inter alia, allowed Bill Graham, then Minister for External Affairs, to get up on his hind legs and say that he was reliably informed that Arar had not been tortured happened at a time when the press was full of stories that just that had happened. I'm 99.9% sure that no-one was actually misled in those briefings but they certainly provided the 'plausible deniability' for ministers which was surely their true purpose.

So what happens now? My money says SFA. Stephen Harper is not going to do anything that jeopardises his status as second poodle to Dubya. So the incompetent will be promoted, the public will be reassured that procedures are in place to make sure it can never happen again until the next time and so on.

It's not a good day for Canada and it ought to be a wake up call to those who look at the train wreck to our south and say 'it couldn't happen here'. Next time you are voting, remember that both the Tories and the Liberals are deeply implicated in this.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

...and vote for whom?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I think that's a riding by riding decision. My riding will elect Bill Graham again. It would elect Bill Graham if he was shown on live TV personally torturing Arar. I'll vote Green or NDP depending which puts up the most credible candidate.

[forthright.livejournal.com]

You are quite right, of course, that both the Tories and Liberals are guilty of the sort of logic that allows each to blame the other for problems (or to pass the buck off to the RCMP). And of course, as I am someone who is well to the left in the political spectrum, and in a riding that is one of the safest Liberal ridings in the country, I have choices come the next election other than blue or red. One or more of them may even be good choices (if symbolic)! Alas, for probably half of the rural ridings in this country, there will be no meaningful choice, just as there never is. One only has to look at last night's New Brunswick election results to see that.

It's pretty obvious that the Tories have rightly perceived that torturing brown-skinned people is not a hot-button issue with the electorate. It won't be a wake-up call because even if they were fully aware of it, I'm not convinced that most Canadians, regardless of political leanings, really care enough to change their voting behaviour.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with you. My point, at least in part, is to guard against the "it couldn't happen here" complacency with which many on the centre left of Canadian politics regard the current state of US politics. Take away the Quebec numbers and Canada looks horribly like the US with the balance just swinging away from the Fundie loonies, but only just (of course that might be the case in the US too but for ballot rigging, who knows?).

I really don't know where we go from here. As far as I can see the Liberals are corrupt on every possible level and quite unreformable. The NDP can't seem to get away from fighting the economic battles of the 1970s and seems quite unwilling to even consider what it might take to be a credible third force, let alone a governing party. It's not easy to see where change can come from.

[forthright.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, I don't agree with you there. Sure there is leftism in Quebec but a lot of it is decidedly authoritarian in nature, not just on the language issue either. Having lived in both Toronto and Montreal, I see just how dissimilar the two are in terms of their perspective on immigrants, and Montreal does not fare well in that comparison!

Yes the Liberals have deep, deep problems with corruption, but 'unreformable'? That seems overly harsh. I agree that they are very unlikely to reform within the next electoral cycle, or even the next full 5-year span, which will make the next couple of elections sort of odd, but there are still a lot of people at the riding level who continue to believe, honestly, in traditional Liberal values and principles. Whether those people have any real influence is open to debate.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

The issue isn't Toronto vs Montreal; both on any reasonable set of indicators would be firmly on the left/liberal side of almost any social issue. What's different about Quebec (and polls show it quite clearly) is that on bellweather issues like gay marriage, the death penalty, support for the Iraq war etc, rural Quebec looks remarkably like the cities whereas rural Canada west of the Ottawa river is remarkably conservative. It's arithmetic. Take Quebec out of the numbers on the sort of issues I just mentioned and it's a close vote, rather like the US.

As to the Liberals, what is likely to happen, that hasn't already happened, to jolt them?

[forthright.livejournal.com]

I think you're wrong, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, 'the US' is not a unified entity. It may be that rural Ontario is like rural Minnesota or Massachusetts, but these are atypical states within the American context. The population of the GTA and Vancouver skew the remaining 25 million heavily, and *far* to the left in terms of the American context. I just don't see how the polls you are talking about indicate that English Canada is at all like the US (as a whole) in terms of social conservatism.

But setting that aside, the real issue with Arar is one of race. If Joe Smith from Kamloops had been deported somehow, I think the response would be very different. And on racial/immigration issues, Quebec is more xenophobic than Ontario, which is partly but by no means entirely a consequence of linguistic politics and ethnonationalism, which are of course nearly entirely absent among most Anglo-canadians.