TORONTO: After 18 months spent battling the immigration department, Sister Mary Jo Leddy is to call for a full-scale public inquiry into the “gridlock,” incompetence, and perhaps even racism, that she says its handling of refugee claims.
In a speech to the annual conference of the Canadian Council on Refugees in Calgary today, Leddy claims civil servants in the department lost documents, distorted information in refugees’ files and ignored their ministers.
Leddy is a leader of the Ontario Sanctuary Coalition trying to win refugee status for those it fears will be killed or tortured if they’re sent home.
Is this a totally incompetent bureaucratic mess and a lot of people are getting chewed up in it?” the outspoken nun asked in an interview. “Or is it sinister? Is it racist? Or is it that a system is self-justifying and that a lot of people are going to be killed because of their righteousness?”
When she and her colleagues started the claim process in June 1992, “we thought the problem was the minister of immigration (then Bernard Val court). It has been a real shock to us, seeing the civil servants watching the politicians come and go and waiting them out”
The department’s civil servants tried to outwait then prime minister Brian Mulroney, she claims, by trying to delay dealing with some cases until after June 25, the day he was to hand over office to Kim Campbell.
And they tried to outwait Doug Lewis, whose summer job as minister of public security in the brief Campbell government put him in charge of immigration.
In the end, says Leddy, it was only the intervention of Mulroney, Lewis and his executive assistant, Blair Dickerson that prevented undue deportations and enabled 18 of the 23 refugee claimants to win ministerial permission to stay in Canada.
Samra has pleaded not guilty before Justice Edward Then to two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder on March 18, 1982. On the plane flying back to Canada, Samra told Sidhu he did not want to talk about the killings but would tell the judge everything. The jury of nine women and three men has been told that Samra was so upset at how the Shromani Sikh Society Temple on Pape Ave, was conducting the annual elections that he took the election committee to court. When Justice John Osier, then of the Supreme Court of Ontario, ruled against Samra, a man was seen to walk clockwise around the courtrooms spraying a 357 magnum handgun. ‘The gun was dropped in the courtroom doorway and matching bullets were found in a car belonging to Samra, which was parked outside the courthouse, the jury has heard. But Samra had vanished and it took 10 years to track him to his native India. Samra has said his passion to help his community destroyed his married life and made it almost impossible to earn a living because of the vast amount of time he devoted to it.
He told the jury he should be charged with manslaughter, not first degree murder, the trail is continuing.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 19, 1993
