To hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the most dangerous man in the land is Omar Khadr.
The country is in grave danger, according to Harper, from a fellow who:
- was dragged as a boy to Pakistran and Afghanistan from Toronto, where he was born, by his militant parents.
- was sent to the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, where he was tortured and spent nearly 10 years there without a trial.
- was convicted on sketchy evidence by a U.S. military tribunal as a war criminal for throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, the first child to ever be convicted of those charges.
- was abandoned in Guantanamo by the Canadian government when all other countries had repatriated their civilians being held there by the U.S., brought them home and tried them of the crimes they were accused of in open courts.
- was denied any of the international legal provisions that Canada has agreed to uphold regarding capture and punishment of child soldiers.
- had to go all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada just to win the right to be released on bail last week, at the age of 28.
That hardly sounds like a young man about to destroy Canada and everything it stands for. It sounds more like a victim of circumstance who was persecuted by his own government for killing one man in a war zone while still legally a child.
Perhaps the lens has been pointed in the wrong direction.
Perhaps the real threat to the safety and liberty of Canada and Canadians is not Omar Khadr, it's Stephen Harper. Here's a fellow who:
- has used the power and authority of his office to persecute a single Canadian and spend millions of taxpayers dollars in legal fees in an endless effort to keep him imprisoned.
- has spent millions more challenging courts across the country, right up to the Supreme Court, on various other legal rulings he did not like (physician assisted-suicide and prostitution, to name two) and then used his position to complain about the power of the Supreme Court having the nerve to apply the law equally to everyone, including the Prime Minister.
- has devoted millions of dollars to secretly spying on Canadians through their e-mails, cellphones and computers and then sharing that data with U.S. intelligence agencies (Canadians would still be mostly in the dark about that if Edward Snowden hadn't come along).
- has legislated increased police and surveillance powers over Canadian citizens without a stitch of evidence to show Canada is under increased threat of terrorist activity or that such powers would actually make Canadians safer.
- has spent tens of millions of dollars on the same kind of shameless self-serving government advertising he once deplored when he was head of the National Citizens Coalition. Part of that spending has been on a taxpapyer-funded YouTube channel and website of good news videos featuring himself and his noble deeds because Canadians should pay for the privilege of being told how wonderful Stephen Harper is for Canada.
Harper has much to answer for in the federal election this fall in regard to his policies, his spending and his future goals but the merit or faults of those decisions and priorities are political and debatable. Harper's actions on the Khadr file, however, weren't just wrong, they were immoral. Historians will rightly praise Harper for his honest and sincere apologies to First Nations for their treatment in residential schools and to Chinese-Canadians for the deplorable head tax but they will likely find Harper's extensive bullying of Khadr to be a stain on both the man and his office.
It's not too late, however.
A brave leader admits his shortcomings and takes responsibility when others have suffered due to his actions or inaction. Harper personally apologized to Maher Arar and paid him $10.5 million, after Arar, also a Canadian citizen, was stopped at a New York airport by U.S. officials suspecting he was an al-Qaeda terrorist. Stripped of his legal rights, Arar was sent to Syria for nearly a year, where he was tortured. A national inquiry found no evidence linking Arar to any terrorist activity at any time.
Apologizing to Arar was the right thing for Harper to do on behalf of all Canadians and the federal government. The courts have spoken on Khadr and now it's time for Harper, rather than another prime minister on another day in the near or distant future, to say sorry.
