Posted on 01/03/2006 10:37:45 PM PST by F14 Pilot
It’s time to clear the air about our relations with the United States and how they impact on our immigration policy.
Recently, a very frustrated Paul Martin turned up the heat on the Americans after they persisted in refusing to play fair on the softwood lumber issue.
The prime minister’s message clearly got the attention of our southern neighbours.
Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson replied on Dec. 19 saying: “Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York.”
As if that wasn’t enough, he added that Canada “is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving … he’s nice but you don’t take him seriously.”
I took far more seriously the comments of Montana Senator Conrad Burns who weighed into the fray by saying “We’ve got to remember that the people who first hit us in 9/11 entered this country through Canada.”
Within days he retracted his statement by saying he “misspoke on this matter.”
Burns is not the first senior American politician who has publicly expressed this view. Newt Gingrich made a similar statement in April 2005. He, too, retracted his statement and apologized for “perpetuating the error … one I am sure has been very painful to (Canadians).”
Apologies and retractions notwithstanding, many Americans still believe this urban myth. The fact is that the 9/11 hijackers were admitted to the U.S. by U.S. border officials. Not by ours. While sympathy is due, we bear absolutely no culpability for these events.
Unfortunately, since Sept. 11, 2001, our federal government has acted as if we were “guilty as charged.” To appease our American friends, we have adopted every idiotic airline security measure asked of us, such as confiscating tweezers and toenail clippers. We have removed our shoes when asked. We have surrendered our passenger manifests and even turned over our Canadian citizens for torture abroad just to make our neighbours feel like we are behind them.
Notwithstanding these concessions, the Americans also wanted to control Canada’s refugee program which they felt constituted a threat to the United States. How could they do this without appearing to violate Canada’s sovereignty? Simple.
Since many refugees can only reach Canada through a connecting flight somewhere in the United States, we would simply require claimants to advance their claim in the first “safe” country they reach and deny them the right to make a claim thereafter in Canada. And so, on Dec. 29, 2004, we entered into an agreement with the US declaring it a “safe” country. Accordingly, we have stranded thousands of asylum seekers in the U.S. and effectively subcontracted out a significant percentage of our asylum cases to the American refugee determination system, which can only be described one way: a joke.
This space is inadequate to expand on this assessment so I defer to a recent New York Times article at www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/national/26immigration.html (free registration required).
In 1986, the UN’s Nansen medal was awarded to Canada for our treatment of refugees. As for the American system, this is what U.S. judge Ilana Rovner recently said to a U.S. government lawyer trying to defend her government’s decision in a refugee case: “It is so cruel to send a lovely human being like you in here to be a messenger of such madness, such nonsense.”
With an election looming, it’s time we return to our own values on immigration and end this absurd attempt to pacify our American friends who may need yet more time to realize that our immigration system had nothing to do with the tragedy of 9/11.
Guidy Mamann practises law in Toronto at Mamann & Associates and is certified by the Ontario Law Society as an immigration specialist. Reach him at 416-862-0000. Confidential e-mails may be directed to Mr. Mamann at metro@migrationlaw.com.
He's bound to be a Liberal as well.
The policy sounds fair to me. If you are a refugee, you should apply for such status in the first free country you enter. You should not be shopping around for a country to flee to. Otherwise, your refugee claim loses credibility. the only reason so many so-called refugees want to go to Canada is that immigration there has very lax standards and the refugees get to have government paid housing and welfare. A lot of so called refugees arrive by air without passports or any other ID. They destroy them on the plane after boarding to facilitate a refugee claim. Without ID there is no way know exactly who they are so immigration has to assume they are refugees.
Consider the source. The writer is an immigration lawyer whose livelihood was severely curtailed by the new rules.
According to this well educated author the USA has been unfair and has not let Canada (actually the problem is only with British Columbia) dump their lumber.
I guess this article is about serious security issues in Canada and the USA with refugees and airlines and torture but it leads off with how unfair Americans are when it comes to lumber.
This is how Canadians reason.
Get it?
Me either, but Tucker Carlsons (who?) mocking being front page news in Canada is an even better example of how many Canadians are so out of touch on the important issues of the day.
One of these issues is the brain drain of Canadian professionals to the USA, but THAT must never be discussed or even acknowledged.
For a Northern people Canadian liberals and socialists are terribly thin skinned.
Or as another Freeper pointed out liberals (and most Canadians are very liberal) are grandious, paranoid and delusional.
Most Canadians really believe they have good reasons to be grandious and paranoid with Americans.
But in the Canadian election it is the Liberals delusions about Americans that are becoming most apparent.
This article makes me cringe on so many levels, I don't know where to start. Reading this makes me want to go home, close the curtains, and drink a magnum of wine, whilst weeping. Damn this journalist is a f*cking idiot.
Bump for later.
It's Little Brother Syndrome. I don't know if Canadians wish they were more like the US, imagining what they could do with all that power, or that they LIKE being the Newfoundland dog of nations--large in size but more likely to sleep at your feet than go out and hunt something. But in their need to distinguish themselves from the US, they seem to have misplaced their values, claiming this silly stuff as the writer in the article does--whoever heard of the award from the UN he mentions?--like it's some monumental triumph, and diminishing the US war on terror like it's nothing at all but an excuse for Americans to torture someone.
That this is the second Canadian piece in one week I've read where someone mentions not just the Carlson comments but the Gingrich and the other comment--MONTHS old quotations--shows Canadians trying to kiss up to their UN pals will go to any length, while resorting to trade disputes so minor that you would never know the goddamned country would collapse in a week without US trade to show how "in opposition" they are to us.
I really am uncomfortable with broad-brush comments about countries. But every Canadian should include the US in his or her nightly prayers for all we do for them, instead of this prissy, picayune crap they keep flinging at us. OK, TWO Americans made misstatements about 9-11 and RETRACTED them--wow, ok, that's a monumental slander, unlike anything in the history of the planet Earth, gee, we're sorry, ok? Now go live your subsidized lives which you would never have without our trade, and live secure in the knowledge that our defense budget is protecting you and allows you all to piss and moan about the best friends anyone in this world could have.
And then STFU already, you ungrateful little jerks.
Although it's true the American immigration system is a joke if Canada doesn't change theirs and in a hurry the only law Guidy Mamann will be practicing in 20 years is Sharia.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20031209-114319-3699r.htm
Some U.S. officials have speculated that September 11 planner Mohamed Atta, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 as it crashed into the World Trade Center, traveled, to Canada through Portland, Maine, on the eve of the attacks to meet with his "handler." There has been no other explanation for his Sept. 10, 2001, trip to Portland, from which he could have taken unchallenged the Quoddy Loop ferry line into Canada.
... yes and we will protect your a$$ from the evil ones when the rubber hits the road. Amen
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 2:33 AM
To: metro
Subject: Time to take off 9/11-coloured glasses
Stop being so selfish and concerned with only your personal "rice bowl."
There is a shooting war going on in the world that was not started by western civilization. Radical Islam not the US is the enemy.
Response:
Lee: I don't think I am being selfish.
We should support all reasonable measures to combat terrorism. I just don't think its necessary for our refugees to be selected by the US. I think we can do a great job on it. Don't you think so?
Yours Truly, Guidy Mamann, LL.B., Barrister & Solicitor
I find that attitude intolerable.
However Canada and the USA are REALLY the best of strategic partners.
Huge amounts of Canadian resources and Canadian resourcefulness benefit Americans on a daily basis and will continue to do so, and vice versa.
The Canadians Liberal faith in the future of the Pacific Rim (i.e. China)as a buyer of Canadian resources is not going to replace real Canadian-USA trade anytime soon.
Goods and people in North America move much more easily north and south than east to west and the Liberals and socialists in Canada cannot change that fact, although they will keep trying.
The Mohamed Atta going through Canada conspiracy theory was debunked long ago. We let him in, we paid the price. The folks over at the WP need to put on the tinfoil hat...
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