Kenney seeks power to bar people from entering Canada for ‘public-policy considerations’

[Lucy Goosey]

Um, holy fuck, y'all. This is quite the power grab.

Mr. Kenney insisted that he intends to spell out to a parliamentary committee the criteria he would use to judge whether someone should be denied entry. He said it would be “an extraordinary power in very exceptional cases to deny admission, essentially when we believe a foreign national may come to Canada [and] promote hatred which could lead to violence.

“That’s really the sort of criteria we’re looking at,” he said. “We’re not looking at some broad, generalized power to prevent the admission of people to Canada whose political opinions we disagree with.”

In fact, his own office has done just that in the past. Federal Court of Canada Justice Richard Mosley ruled in 2010 that Mr. Kenney’s political staffers arranged to bar controversial British MP George Galloway from entering Canada in 2009 because they did not like his political views.

Border officials rushed an assessment that Mr. Galloway was inadmissible on national-security grounds because he had brought aid to Gaza, where Hamas, listed as a terror entity, was in power. But Justice Mosley found the decision had more to do with “antipathy to his political views” than national security.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/kenney-seeks-power-to-bar-people-from-entering-canada-for-public-policy-considerations/article4617304/