Premier Dalton McGuinty has torn a strip off of the federal government for bungling that left an Ontario woman languishing in Kenya for three months.
A visibly unhappy McGuinty told reporters this morning that the way Canadian diplomats in Nairobi treated Toronto’s Suaad Hagi Mohamud was inexcusable.
In the eyes of officials in Kenya, Mohamud did not resemble her passport photo, so she was accused of being an imposter trying to sneak in to Canada and arrested. She was forced to suffer through the ignominy of a DNA test to prove her identity.
“Something is fundamentally wrong when we can’t count on the Canadian government to stand up for Canadians. I’m not sure I can put it any more directly than that,” said McGuinty.
“It doesn’t matter where we find ourselves, we are citizens of this wonderful country and we have responsibilities and we have certain legitimate expectation,” he said.
“And one of those (expectations) is when we find ourselves in distress that our government will stand up for us. That didn’t happen in this particular circumstance and there’s no excuse for that.”
The premier’s comments are especially pointed given that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to weigh in on the case and his ministers have largely been missing in action.
Neither Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan has commented on Mohamud’s plight and critics have accused Ottawa of ignoring her because she is a black Muslim woman.
In another high-profile case, Brenda Martin, a white woman held in a Mexican jail, was flown home on a government jet after the Harper administration intervened.
Source: TheStar
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Somebody in Kenya either jumped the shark or had a spidey sense that something was amiss. Usually we fault government employees for shirking their duties – this time for being too over diligent. No win.
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Somebody in Kenya either jumped the shark or had a spidey sense that something was amiss. Usually we fault government employees for shirking their duties – this time for being too over diligent. No win.
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