KHADR PAYOUT HAS HUSH-MONEY FEEL
Majority of Canadians don’t think government made right call: poll
We’re still in the early innings, but it would appear that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pieties about the sanctity of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms aren’t quite a match for the blowback over his government’s decision to cough up $10.5 million and an apology in a secret deal with Guantanamo Bay’s loudly-argued-about former inmate, Omar Khadr.
It turns out that Canadians are so put off by the arrangement — 71 per cent of respondents in an in-depth Angus Reid public opinion survey say it was the wrong thing to do — that three in five Liberals, even, agree with Conservative leader Andrew Scheer that the case should have been fought in court, to the end.
Unsurprisingly, Conservative-leaning voters are the most likely to express revulsion about the deal, which was leaked to the news media last week. The agreement settles a lawsuit Khadr’s lawyers filed in 2004 alleging that Canadian officials collaborated with U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo in a way that “offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects,” in the words of a 2010 Supreme Court of Canada ruling.
The Angus Reid poll found 91 per cent of Conservative voters said the Trudeau government did the “wrong thing” in settling with Khadr. But 61 per cent of Liberals took the same view, and 64 per cent of New Democrats also agreed that the government “should have fought the case and left it to the courts to decide.” That is precisely what Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has been saying.
The public mood should not be expected to soften unless Trudeau manages to dispel the impression that the deal was a kind of hush-money arrangement, designed to make the Khadr problem go away and head off the scandal that would inevitably emerge from the evidence in a hard-fought court trial.
Khadr’s civil suit was heavily focused on the unconstitutional conduct of the Liberal government in the 2002-2003 Chrétien-Martin period. Liberal heavyweights and officials from that epoch were included in formulating the Khadr settlement. Because of the deal’s convenient confidentiality clause it is not even clear whether or when Trudeau approved it or whether he learned of the deal’s contents only when everybody else did.
Last Friday, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale attempted to fault the previous Conservative government for the mess: “The Conservative government could have repatriated Mr. Khadr or otherwise resolved the matter.” But that falls flat, and not just because Goodale was a cabinet minister back in 2002-2003 when
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects all Canadians, every one of us, even when it is uncomfortable. PRIME MINISTER JUSTIN TRUDEAU
the misdeeds were being committed by Canadian officials apparently working on the instruction that Khadr’s constitutional rights did not exist.
In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned lowercourt orders and agreed with Stephen Harper’s Conservative government that it was perfectly entitled to drag its feet in Khadr’s repatriation from Guantanamo, which was completed in 2013, when Khadr was transferred to a Canadian prison. Now 30, Khadr was released on bail in 2015, pending his appeal of a variety of Guantanamo military-court convictions, and lives in Edmonton.
The Liberals have also been insisting that the deal’s $10.5 million payout should be understood as a cost-saving measure, because Khadr was certain to win his suit — he was going for $20 million, and you never know what a judge might decide. In other words, the government had no choice. Two-thirds of Angus Reid’s respondents don’t believe it. More than half of the poll’s Liberal respondents (56 per cent) don’t believe it, either.
Also, that Ontario Superior Court injunction application aimed at heading off any payout to Khadr, filed June 8 by the widow of Delta Force Sgt. Christopher Speer, the U.S. soldier Khadr may or may not have murdered in Afghanistan in 2002? Just an astonishing coincidence, we are told to believe.
The main talking points the Liberals are sticking to like syrup are all variations on the theme Trudeau articulated in his first proper statement on the affair last Saturday, six days after the news broke, in response to a question at a G20 news conference in Hamburg: “The Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects all Canadians, every one of us, even when it is uncomfortable. When the government violates any Canadian’s charter rights, we all end up paying for it.”
There’s little in the Angus Reid findings to suggest that Canadians disagree with this eminently defensible but otherwise purposely point-missing, subject-changing piety, or require instruction in the principle that governments should generally make restitution when a citizen’s rights are ignored or trampled. But there is a lot in the poll’s findings to suggest that Canadians are skeptical about the degree of injustice Khadr is ordinarily said to have suffered.
Asked if they believed Khadr had been treated fairly or unfairly, 42 per cent of respondents answered that they weren’t sure or couldn’t say, 34 per cent said Khadr had been treated fairly, and only 24 per cent said Khadr had been treated unfairly. While roughly four in 10 Canadians said they’d have offered Khadr neither apology nor compensation (the view of one in three Liberals, too), another one in four said an apology alone should suffice.
In a commonplace failing of public opinion polls, one question appears to unfairly expect respondents to know things they would have no way of knowing. Asked whether Khadr is potentially a “radicalized” threat to Canada, two-thirds of poll respondents said they believed he was.
Khadr’s notorious al-Qaida family put him in harm’s way in Afghanistan when he was an adolescent, and Khadr spent his post-9/11 time there building improvised explosive devices for the Taliban. In 2002, when Khadr was a combatant in that firefight in which he may or may not have murdered Sgt. Speer, he was only 15.
In the years since his return to Canada, Khadr has never expressed anything less than remorse about his past, and he has given every impression of being a rather sad but otherwise hopeful and respectable person who just wants to get on with his life.
As for Trudeau’s hopes to get on with his political agenda, this whole sorry business looks like bad news all around. But you never know.
During the 2015 election campaign, public opinion polls showed an overwhelming majority of Canadians supported the Conservative proposition that the wearing of niqabs and other such face-veilings should be prohibited during the swearing of citizenship oaths. In several emotional speeches, Trudeau went out of his way to traduce the proposition, going so far as to compare niqab-ban supporters to the “none is too many” cretins who were content to turn away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
Trudeau wasn’t punished for it. He was rewarded at the polls for his pluck and obstinacy. If, in place of an honest accounting of what went into the Khadr deal, all we get from Trudeau is another series of florid and extravagant speeches about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you never know.
It just might work.