Ottawa Citizen — OTTAWA — An outspoken British MP opposed to the war in Afghanistan says he intends to take legal action against the Harper government over its decision to refuse him entry to Canada.
George Galloway, the Respect party MP, says he learned Friday that he would not be allowed into the country on speaking tour scheduled to bring him to Toronto and Ottawa later this month.
A former Labour MP, Galloway is a contentious figure whose public support for Hamas and Hezbollah has led to him being accused of being a terrorist sympathizer.
A spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney confirmed that Galloway would not be permitted entry should he show up at a point-of-entry. Galloway was told he would not be allowed in because border security officials made an operational decision based on a number of factors, according to Kenney’s director of communications, Alykhan Velshi.
Kenney could override that decision by granting a ministerial permit, but that won’t happen in this case. The minister will not “provide special treatment to a man who brags about giving ‘financial support’ to Hamas, a banned terrorist organisation in Canada, or who offers sympathy for Canada’s enemies in Afghanistan,” Velshi wrote in an email.
“I’m sure Mr. Galloway has a large Rolodex of friends in regimes elsewhere in the world willing to roll out the red carpet for him. Canada, however, won’t be one of them.”
Galloway, 58, told the Citizen Friday that he intends to challenge the department’s decision in Federal Court.
“We’ll be in court soon to try and overturn this,” Galloway said. “Canada remains a free country with an independent judiciary. They will have to review whether he has acted reasonably in these circumstance.”
The Scottish-born MP has traveled on speaking tours in Canada before. He says he learned he would be barred entry to Canada from a story leaked to the conservative British tabloid The Sun. It suggested his opposition to the war in Afghanistan was the reason.
“I’m not a supporter of terrorism,” Galloway told the Citizen from his London office on Friday.
“I’m an opponent of the Canadian government’s idea of how to combat terrorism. And that must be a legitimate area for public debate amongst parliamentarians of democracies, especially democracies as close as Britain and Canada.”
He believes the war in Afghanistan is doomed.
“Nobody every successfully occupied Afghanistan, not even Alexander the Great, and Jason Kenney is not Alexander the Great,” he said.
He said he was shocked that Canada would deny an elected politician from another democracy the right to express that view.
“The Canadian government wants to support your troops by sending them to their deaths; I want to support them by removing them from harms way. Whatever view you have on that, it’s a legitimate area of debate.”
Galloway, who represents a working class riding of East London, was also slated to appear on the CBC talk show The Hour. He had appeared on the show in the past during a previous speaking tour in Canada.
Galloway says Canada is the only country where he his banned from entering. Even Israel will allow him in, he says.
In 2006, Galloway was temporarily denied entry to Egypt on his way to give evidence before a mock trial of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Egyptian government quickly reversed its decision and granted him entry.
B’Nai Brith Canada yesterday congratulated the government for denying Galloway entry. The Jewish organization’s president, Frank Dimant, said in a statement: “those who support the pro-terrorist agenda of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, whose avowed aim is the destruction of the Jewish State, should not be given public platforms to spew their vile messaging.”
The NDP, however, denounced the decision as another example of limiting free speech by political opponents. NDP MP Olivia Chow called Kenney “the minister of censorship” and compared the decision on Galloway to the case of William Ayers, a former student radical-turned education professor who was turned back at the Canadian border when he arrived at a Toronto’s Island airport from Chicago.
Ayers was coming to give a talk to the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, but was not allowed into the country by border guards.
Ayers was a member of the notorious Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the 1960s activist movement Students for a Democratic Society that claimed responsibility for a campaign of bombings, riots, and a successful jailbreak in the early 1970s. The group’s activities included bombings at the U.S. Capitol, a Pentagon restroom and New York City police headquarters. Ayers’s friend Terry Robbins and his girlfiend Diana Oughton were both killed in 1970 when a nail bomb they were assembling in a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded.
After a number of years in hiding from the FBI, Ayers has since reinvented himself as an education theorist and activist for municipal reform in Chicago. He made headlines last summer over his relationship with then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama — the two had socialized and worked together on Chicago school reform projects.
The Canadian Border Services Agency never explained why Ayers was denied entry into the country.
