George Galloway lost his challenge to a government decision that kept him from entering Canada, but Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is the real loser in the case.
Galloway is a self-promoting gadfly who attracts attention to himself by helping terrorists get money and sympathy for their activities. Even his own constituents got tired of his antics and kicked him out in the last British election.
But he’s a small-time agitator and Kenney only helped his cause by acting to block him from entering the country. No one but his own sparse collection of followers would have known he was here if the minister hadn’t stumbled onto the scene.
Galloway lost his case on a technicality. Since he decided not to show up, he was never formally denied entry and thus there was no case to challenge. But Justice Richard Mosley made clear that Kenney wasn’t fooling anyone. It was clear, he said, that the decision was political from the get-go, and Kenney and his director of communications, Alykhan Velshi, just tried to hide it by cloaking it in terms of national security:
“The result, in my view, was a flawed and overreaching interpretation of the standards under Canadian law for labelling someone as engaging in terrorism or being a member of a terrorist organization,” the judgment reads. “It is clear that the efforts to keep Mr. Galloway out of the country had more to do with antipathy to his political views than with any real concern that he had engaged in terrorism or was a member of a terrorist organization.”
In his ruling, Mosley outlined a chain of events that started on March 16, 2009 with Velshi doing some on-line research of open sources about Galloway’s activities. Velshi “expressed the view that Mr. Galloway was inadmissable” in e-mails that circulated through the Immigration Department in the next few hours.
“Apart from the open sources cited by Mr. Velshi in his e-mails, it does not appear from the record what, if any, additional research was conducted. When consulted, CSIS advised CBSA that they had no concerns with Mr. Galloway’s visit from a security perspective,” Mosley said in the ruling.
Government officials reached a decision that was not reasonable and erred in its application of the law, but the judge noted the “novel” circumstances they faced with their political masters.
“Moreover, they were being asked to provide a rapid assessment in circumstances where Ministers’ offices were actively engaged and where political staff and senior officials had already staked out a position . . . the assessment was written after political staff and senior officials had prematurely reached the conclusion that Galloway was inadmissable.”
Canada doesn’t need amateur theatrics like this from its immigration minister. People like George Galloway are inconsequentiual. We should leave them to their obscurity.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/09/28/galloway-should-have-been-left-to-his-obscurity/#ixzz10tF2bGJH