Canada still sucks; Conservative MPs are “turds”, says party director

I was hoping Abousfian Abdelrazik would come up in this election, especially now that the Conservatives have failed to issue him the travel documents they’d promised in April, but no luck yet. They probably promised because they knew it would be almost impossible for him to buy a plane ticket home – did you know that being on the U.S. no-fly list means that any airline which transports you, anywhere in the world, can never again enter U.S. airspace? Anyways, Abdelrazik, who has been stuck in Somalia since 2003 and has been living at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum since the spring, managed to buy a ticket (on the same airline that took Maher Arar to Belgium to speak to an E.U. committee), but then was refused an emergency one-use passport. I can’t imagine the Tories giving in on this one without any pressure, and none of the other parties have stepped up, so I guess he’ll have to wait for his day in court (he’s sued Ottawa for a travel document). It looks like he’ll win, since the rules are very clear — the U.N. blacklist Canada put him on explicitly allows suspects to return home, and the courts have ruled several times that all Canadian citizens have the right to a passport. Needless to say, despite CSIS having interrogated Abdelrazik in Somalia, no-one’s found any grounds to actually arrest and charge him with anything…

Way to learn from Arar, Canada.

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Also: how tightly enforced is discipline in the Conservative Party? According to them, not very, thanks to some MPs being “idiots” and “turds” by listening to Elections Canada instead of the Party’s national director.