Posted Today, 12:06 PM
While I am proud to live in a multicultural country, as a white citizen I often wonder what the experience of my fellow non white citizens is. Canadians like to have an image in our mind that this country is a beacon of fairness and tolerance.While in Ghana, many people remarked to me that they liked Canada because it was a peaceful country. I simply nodded, not wishing to discuss politics while traveling. What I really wanted to say was that Canada has been involved in a war in Afghanistan for many years, so we are not entirely peaceful. The fact is that my fellow citizens are dying in Afghanistan while killing other people.
Make no mistake, I love my country, but we still have work to do. In smaller locales our foreign service is a pile of junk run by twits. To have the Canadian embassy actually tell the Kenyan government that this woman was "an imposter" is truly frightening.
My own experience of trying to contact the Canadian Embassy in Accra, Ghana prior to my trip was an embarrassment of unanswered emails and dead links.
The message to all Canadians who wish to travel to obscure places is that at best you are on your own and at worst your own government may actively participate in your unjust incarceration.
d'Oh, Canada
The following is reprinted from The Waterloo Star.
August 13, 2009
A Canadian mother has endured intolerable treatment at the hands of her own government.
On May 21, Suaad Hagi Mohamud was at the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, getting ready to board a flight back to Canada after visiting her mother, when Kenyan police pulled her aside, saying she did not look like the photo in her four-year-old passport.
She appealed to Canadian diplomats in Kenya, who, far from helping her, sent her voided passport to Kenyan immigration authorities to help prosecute her.
Mohamud produced plenty of other Canadian-issued identification to prove that she was, in fact, who she said she was: her driver’s licence, OHIP card, social insurance card and citizenship card. She also produced her credit card and bank cards, a hospital card, receipts from a Toronto dry cleaner and a letter from her Toronto employer. To no avail.
The 31-year-old spent four days in airport detention, eight days in a Kenyan prison for women before a friend managed to scare up bail money. She has been separated from her 12-year-old son, who stayed in Canada with his dad when she left on what was supposed to be a two-week trip. She worried that after her long absence, she would lose her job (her boss says there’s no fear of that) and her apartment, where the rent hasn’t been paid while she fought her legal battles in Nairobi.
She insisted on being fingerprinted, remembering that she had been fingerprinted more than a decade before when applying for her Canadian citizenship, only to discover those prints had been destroyed after her citizenship application was successful. Her ex-husband filed affidavits, her Canadian lawyer argued on her behalf, friends and co-workers vouched for her and sent her money. Finally, the DNA test she demanded has vindicated her, proving with “99.99 per cent” certainty that she is no impostor. Canadian officials now say they are working to issue her documents to allow her to return home.
Her Kafkaesque treatment by Canadian government officials is nothing short of outrageous.
No one should have to go through the humiliating and frightening experience Mohamud went through, especially not at the hands of officials from your own country.
“I’d hate to be stuck in some country and call my embassy for help and get a reaction like this,” said her Canadian lawyer, Raoul Boulakia.
If the government feels that the photo identification provided on a tamper-proof passport is insufficient, then the onus is on the authorities to provide Canadians travelling abroad with a document they feel is adequate.
If the government has concerns that Mohamud is some sort of security risk — and there is no suggestion that it does — then authorities have plenty of tools at their disposal to monitor her and detain her if necessary. But to leave a Canadian stranded, in limbo, much as it left Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik in limbo for years in Sudan, is shameful. Is this the standard to which our federal government strives to help citizens and respect their human rights?
Federal officials should, in very short order, re-examine their security standards for the Canadian passport, and compensate Mohamud for this shoddy treatment. The federal government’s cavalier treatment of its citizens abroad is deeply troubling.
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