Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Incompetence personified

Dawg says:
Mr. Harper: Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
Actually, it's even worse than that.
This is just another example of how the Conservatives don't actually know what a federal government is supposed to do. And they don't know how to do it, either. They seem to think they were elected to sabotage the Liberals and trash gay people. They don't seem to realize that one of the primary jobs of a federal government is to protect Canadian citizens, especially when a mistake has been made.
If Suaad Hagi Mohamud had been called Sandra Hallie Montgomery, then maybe the Canadian media and the Canadian public would have been paying more attention, and putting more pressure on the Conservatives to do their job. Suaad Hagi Mohamud is a cautionary tale for all Canadians:
For every Canadian, Mohamud's ordeal raises the question: What proof of identity will Ottawa accept from a stranded citizen abroad?
On May 21, after a Kenyan airport official suggested that Mohamud's lips and eyeglasses were different from her four-year-old passport photo, the hapless traveller laid out all her ID at the Canadian high commission.
She displayed her Ontario driver's licence, OHIP card, social insurance card and Canadian citizenship certificate.
She showed her credit card, two bank cards, Shoppers Drug Mart "Optimum" card, Humber River Regional Hospital Card and a recent dry-cleaning receipt from Bright Cleaners on Lawrence Ave., W., near her Toronto address.
She produced a letter from her Toronto employer, ATS Courier, about a recent promotion.
The high commission rejected them all. Worse, instead of helping Mohamud, they sent her voided passport to Kenyan immigration authorities to help them prosecute her.
"We have carried out conclusive investigations including an interview and have confirmed that the person brought to (us) on suspicion of being an imposter is not the rightful holder of the aforementioned Canadian passport," Canadian vice-consul Liliane Khadour wrote to Kenyan immigration authorities on May 28.
Now three months later Suaad has proven through DNA testing that she actually is the right person, the Canadian citizen who is the real mother of her son in Canada.
Of course, if there's one thing civil servants hate, its admitting they were wrong. And the Conservatives hate this too.
So after Suaad's lawyer got the DNA results, he didn't bother knocking on Foreign Affairs minister Lawrence Cannon's door and expecting him to HIS job of blasting the Canadian Border Service Agency and the Canadian High Commission in Kenya to do THEIR jobs. He went straight to a Federal Court to get them to tell the Canadian government what to do next.
Good call.

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