At any given time there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Canadians in foreign jails.
We don’t bring them all home.
And we don’t, if they have a tenuous connection to Canada, reach out and ask them if they want to move to Canada.
Yet in an interview with Global’s West Block, Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon said that Canada has a responsibility to deal with terrorists in other countries.
Now if McCrimmon were simply a backbench MP then her comments wouldn’t matter much. Instead, she is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety.
Here’s what she told Global.
“We don’t believe in two-tier citizenship and if someone’s a Canadian citizen, we’re responsible for them whether we like it or not,” she said.
“When there’s Canadians abroad who have broken the law, it’s our responsibility to deal with it. We can’t just hand it off to some other nation to deal with.”
Now to a degree, McCrimmon is right, we don’t have two tier citizenship. So if we won’t go out of our way to bring home low level drug dealers caught and prosecuted in other countries, why do so for terrorists?
Plenty of Canadians in foreign jails.
In 2013 the Toronto Star reported that there were 1,590 Canadians imprisoned in other countries. In 2016 CBC reported that there were 1,406 Canadians detained.
Over the years these numbers have ebbed and flowed but there has never been a move to try and bring them all home. Never was it expressed by any government that we needed to bring them all back to Canada.
So why has Canada’s government moved to try and bring home people like Jihadi Jack, a British born and raised man who, according to media reports left Britain to join ISIS?
I’ve written about his story here and here.
McCrimmon isn’t being truthful.
When McCrimmon says that Canada has a responsibility to these Canadians and that to do otherwise is to result in two tier citizenship, she is lying.
If that were the case, then there would be many more Canadians we were fighting to bring home.
The reality is that we often let Canadians that break laws in other countries serve their sentences in in those countries.
And those people have committed crimes far less serious than the terrorist related crimes of ISIS members.
Trudeau is soft on Jihadis.
The truth is that Trudeau and his Liberals have a soft spot for Jihadis. They care more about brining British Jihadis back to Canada than they do bringing Canadian drug dealers back home from foreign countries.
That should tell you something.
In fact, that should tell you plenty.
And it should be worrisome.
Watch the full interview with West Block here.