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Public service
Award Order of Canada to Maher Arar
By struggling to bring to light the true nature of the rcmp and csis, Arar deserves major recognition
By Kevin Potvin
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How about an Order of Canada citation for Maher Arar? Having been returned to Canada after a year of torture in Syria, he could have been satisfied to be alive and back home and left it at that. That is certainly the tone of the government’s, RCMP’s, and CSIS’s initial responses to his first foray into courts to clear his name, not to mention much of the national media. But he persisted and ended up with a commission of inquiry report issued by the government explicitly clearing his name.
He could have been satisfied with that and returned to life as a private citizen. But he chose to pursue the reasons he was sent away to Syria in the first place, despite being paid $10.5 million in compensation and seeing off the head of the RCMP. Only because of Arar’s dogged pursuit of truth have we finally learned the true nature of our national police force and the true nature of our national intelligence service.
As the oft-repeated sports maxim goes, adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals character. Anyone can run a police or intelligence service fair and square under normal circumstances. It is only under new and challenging circumstances that we really see the quality and the leadership we actually have in our public institutions.
The Arar solution
The Arar affair undoubtedly presented a new and challenging set of circumstances to the RCMP and CSIS. Their American counterparts were under siege from a panicked White House administration reeling from a massive breakdown in its own police and intelligence services that opened the door to the spectacular events of 9/11. The Canadian government was put under severe pressure to show cooperation and loyalty to the American government at a time when long-time and solid allies of the Americans, like Germany and France, were being subjected to hair-raising accusations by the Americans spoiling for war with the world.
Had Arar been guilty of participating in terrorist plots, he’d have made an excellent solution of himself to a whole range of problems facing the government, the RCMP and CSIS. The pressure to score points with the Americans under the extraordinary conditions in 2002 was evidently too much for all three institutions to bear, and they each in turn knowingly betrayed their own most revered core principles.
The adversity they faced revealed their character: the RCMP is a police force that will, when it’s convenient, arrest a known innocent Canadian and send him off to American custody. CSIS is an intelligence service that will, when its narrow institutional interests dictate, fabricate evidence to ensure a known innocent Canadian will be tortured by those Americans or their friends. And the government of Canada is an institution that will, when under pressure, cover up these crimes.
It gets worse
These revelations are bad enough. But it’s what happened long after 2002 that really shocks the conscience of Canadians. In the initial inquiry report, several passages of inter-office memos among the RCMP and CSIS were blacked out by those agencies, on the grounds that their revelation would present a risk to Canadian national security. Last week, a judge ordered much of the blacked-out passages revealed. They turned out not to be a risk to national security at all. Instead, they contain the damning passages that show the RCMP knew all along Arar was innocent, that they knew all along he would be subjected to torture, and that CSIS had knowingly fabricated and obscured evidence before a judge to get the warrants necessary for the removal from Canada of a citizen they knew to be innocent.
The day those passages were blacked out was not during a time of new or challenging circumstances. There was no extra-ordinary pressure from the Americans, no unpredictable and impending war, no grave national security at stake then. The blacking out of embarrassing information was done soberly and at ease, under no external pressures at all. The information was withheld from the Canadian public in a national commission of inquiry purely because it was a threat to the personal job security of the leadership of CSIS and the RCMP.
A shrug of the shoulders from our leader
Asked to comment on the stunning revelations shaking Canadians’ confidence in these most important of policing institutions, Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismissed the issue, saying it was all the actions of the previous government and adding that Arar got his $10.5 million, as if the payoff ought to quell Canadians’ fears of systemic and dangerous corruption at the top of our policing institutions.
Arar could easily and with great justification have taken the same view as Harper, having been personally looked after. But alarmed not by what his case caused but by what his case revealed, he stuck to it. Because of him, Canadians now know what the RCMP and CSIS are really all about, and have been all about long before Arar appeared in the press, and continue to be all about to this day. The Order of Canada is intended to bestow recognition on extraordinary Canadians who selflessly perform acts of great contribution to the Canadian common good. That description fits Maher Arar to a “T”.
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