As I argued here and here, British MP George Galloway should be allowed into this country. However, it should be noted that George Galloway never actually tried to enter Canada. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney addressed the matter in an interview with Maclean's magazine, and his comments deserve to be highlighted:
Mr. Galloway received a preliminary notice of determination by the Canadian Border Services Agency that he might be inadmissible to Canada, I gather based in large part on his public admission that he provided funds to Hamas, a banned illegal terrorist organization, which would seem–on the face of it–to constitute grounds for inadmissibility under Section 34(1)f of the Immigration Refugee Protection Act. He was invited to provide submissions to the CBSA to inform their consideration of his potential application to enter Canada. He never provided them with any such submissions and he never presented himself to a point of entry where he would have had, at that point, a final decision on his admissibility, and had he been determined to be inadmissible by an officer at a port of entry he would have been able to apply for an inadmissibility hearing. So there’s a whole process that we have under our law to make determinations independently of politicians about admissibility. I simply said publicly that I would not use my extraordinary ministerial power to effectively overrule a decision of a CBSA officer on his admissibility. Why? Because I didn’t see any compelling reason.
Our friend Terry Glavin has been trying for sometime to get that same point across, and has suffered no end of exasperation in watching how this has been reported. Terry also has the scoop on some interesting developments which could soon make any decision to bar George Galloway a slam dunk.
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