Mohamed Duale can still remember the feeling in the pit of his stomach when a border officer stopped and subjected him to a battery of questions as he tried to re-enter Canada last year.
“It’s because of where you were born — you’re Somalian, right?” the Canadian citizen recalled the agent telling him.
It was a moment that he says stopped him in his tracks.
“I was literally frozen … Being a Black, male, Muslim person with about a dozen CBSA officers alone in a front gate of a departure gate, I’m literally scared,” Duale said.
“I never thought that the discrimination would be so overt or verbalized in such clarity. And it’s words that I will never forget for as long as I live,” he told CBC News.
The interaction, which allegedly happened Sept. 2, 2019, is now the subject of a complaint filed against the Canadian Border Services Agency and accepted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission this past August.
Representing Duale is the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), which argues the 33-year-old’s experience is part of a broader pattern of discrimination by the CBSA and underlines the need for independent oversight of the agency — something that was in Bill C-3 last year before it died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued over the summer.
Canadian citizen Mohamed Duale says his goal in filing the complaint is ‘to make sure that this does not happen to anybody again.’ (CBC)
‘A pattern that is systemic’
“The reality is that discrimination at the border, at the hands of the CBSA, is a pattern that is systemic,” NCCM chief executive officer Mustafa Farooq told CBC News,
Farooq also cites a 2019 report by the auditor general that found the agency did not do enough to address harassment and discrimination in the workplace. He says it shows there are problems with how the CBSA treats people both inside and outside the organization.
“That is the culture. That is the problem at the CBSA,” said Farooq, adding his organization has received two to three complaints per month about the agency over the last year and a half.
A doctoral student at York University, Duale had been travelling back from doing research in a refugee camp, when he arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport close to 5 p.m.
Shortly after disembarking, he says in the complaint, he was told to proceed to secondary screening — something he’d never been asked to do before. There, he says, a “white female CBSA officer” asked him whether he was really a PhD student, what his dissertation topic was and his central argument.
Although examination may seem unpleasant at times, and the relevance of questions posed by our officers may not be obvious… they assist in verifying a traveller’s declaration.– CBSA
Duale says he explained he had been researching the experiences of refugee youth, but as the questions grew more detailed, he says he told the officer he wasn’t obligated to disclose such information to enter his own country.
At that point, he says, the officer put his passport in her pocket and said she wouldn’t return it until he sufficiently answered her questions. Duale tried again to explain the purpose of his trip, but added he hadn’t written his dissertation yet and hadn’t come up with a central argument.
‘Interrogated for trying to enter my own country’
According to the complaint, the agent asked why he wanted to do a PhD. Duale responded that he wanted to become an academic and asked for his passport back, to which the agent replied he would need to show additional identification.
After inspecting his driver’s licence, he says, the officer “threw the passport” into his hand and that it fell to the ground. As he bent down to pick it up, he says the officer told him, “You look nervous.”
Duale on Aug. 21, 2019 at Kakuma Refugee Camp on the way to his research site. (Submitted by Mohamed Duale)
“I replied that I was nervous because I was being interrogated for trying to enter my own country,” Duale said, asking the officer why he’d been treated this way.
It’s at that point that the agent allegedly told him it was because of where he was born, saying he was “Somalian” and adding it was her job to ensure “everyone has the passport that belonged to them.”
Duale says he replied that “Somalian” is an offensive characterization of Somali people and that being born somewhere else doesn’t make a person any less a citizen. Born in Mogadishu, Duale had been a Canadian citizen for 15 years at the time of the incident.
Officers acted professionally, CBSA review finds
When he tried to file a complaint with the CBSA, he says, another officer told him, “Normally there isn’t a problem unless people don’t tell the truth.”
In October of 2019, the CBSA responded to Duale’s complaint, concluding its officers carried out their duties professionally and followed proper procedures.
“You have made strong accusations regarding the comportment and integrity of our officers … The findings of our review do not support the allegations you have made,” the letter said.
“Although examination may seem unpleasant at times, and the relevance of questions posed by our officers may not be obvious and may seem intrusive, they assist in verifying a traveller’s declaration and purpose for travelling.”
But Carleton University professor James Milner, who supervised Duale’s research in Kenya, says he has never seen a case as overt as Duale’s.
Carleton University professor James Milner, who supervised Duale’s research in Kenya, has been at the university for 12 years. In that time, he’s conducted overseas research numerous times and supported dozens of graduate students doing field work, but says he has never seen a border experience this ‘egregious.’ (CBC)
“It’s certainly the most egregious example of unprofessional behaviour that I’ve heard in the context of an immigration official here in Canada,” said Milner, who is also the project director for the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network — a team of researchers and practitioners “committed to promoting protection and solutions with and for refugees,” according to its website.
“As a white male, middle-aged Canadian myself, my experiences crossing borders are typically cordial … And so there is clearly a differentiation based on nationality, based on name, which evokes deeper questions about the way that profiling continues to be used in our border control systems.
Oversight ‘a noted priority’ for public safety minister
Immigration lawyer Guidy Mamann says CBSA officers have the full authority to ask any questions they like but believes in many cases the law gives them too much leeway.
“The officer, in my view, has way too much power. They have the right to copy all of the data in your laptop, all of the data in your phone. They have the right to go through all of your documents,” he said.
“Some of that in certain circumstances is appropriate. But I have seen that done in situations where it defies belief.”
Creating an oversight body is a “noted priority” for Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair, a spokesperson told CBC News.
A spokesperson for Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair says he thanks the National Council of Canadian Muslims for their advocacy and collaboration, and says introducing legislation around CBSA oversight is a ‘noted priority’ of Blair’s mandate. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)
“Minister Blair remains focused on modernizing policing structures and updating standards regarding use of force, and looks forward to tabling legislation that will strengthen oversight in our agencies and increase public trust,” said Blair’s press secretary Mary-Liz Power.
Power added that “there is much more work to do to dismantle the systems that perpetuate racism in our country.”
Anti-Black racism ‘part of life in Canada’
CBSA spokesperson Rebecca Purdy told CBC News it has not received word from the human rights commission of Duale’s complaint but that when complaints are filed, the CBSA “cooperates fully” with the process.
Purdy added that the agency is committed to ensuring all travellers are treated fairly, and that discriminatory behaviour is “not tolerated” by the CBSA.
The agency also says all complaints received by the CBSA are handled in an efficient, professional and impartial manner.
Meanwhile, Duale, who was at the top of his class before the incident, says the encounter left him depressed and demoralized to the point that he couldn’t focus on writing, was sleeping excessively and had to request multiple extensions on deadlines because of his anxiety.
“It’s hard to put down in a few moments a lifetime of experience being discriminated against as a Black man in Canada … It’s been my whole life, really” Duale said.
TORONTO – An Ontario judge says any outstanding issues regarding a proposed $32.5 billion settlement between three major tobacco companies and their creditors should be solvable in the coming months.
Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz has released his reasons for approving a motion last week to have representatives for creditors review and vote on the proposal in December.
One of the companies, JTI-Macdonald Corp., said last week it objects to the plan in its current form and asked the court to postpone scheduling the vote until several issues were resolved.
The other two companies, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges and Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., didn’t oppose the motion but said they retained the right to contest the proposed plan down the line.
The proposal announced last month includes $24 billion for provinces and territories seeking to recover smoking-related health-care costs and about $6 billion for smokers across Canada and their loved ones.
If the proposed deal is accepted by a majority of creditors, it will then move on to the next step: a hearing to obtain the approval of the court, tentatively scheduled for early next year.
In a written decision released Monday, Morawetz said it was clear that not all issues had been resolved at this stage of the proceedings.
He pointed to “outstanding issues” between the companies regarding their respective shares of the total payout, as well as debate over the creditor status of one of JTI-Macdonald’s affiliate companies.
In order to have creditors vote on a proposal, the court must be satisfied the plan isn’t “doomed to fail” either at the creditors or court approval stages, court heard last week.
Lawyers representing plaintiffs in two Quebec class actions, those representing smokers in the rest of Canada, and 10 out of 13 provinces and territories have expressed their support for the proposal, the judge wrote in his ruling.
While JTI-Macdonald said its concerns have not been addressed, the company’s lawyer “acknowledged that the issues were solvable,” Morawetz wrote.
“At this stage, I am unable to conclude that the plans are doomed to fail,” he said.
“There are a number of outstanding issues as between the parties, but there are no issues that, in my view, cannot be solved,” he said.
The proposed settlement is the culmination of more than five years of negotiations in what Morawetz has called one of “the most complex insolvency proceedings in Canadian history.”
The companies sought creditor protection in Ontario in 2019 after Quebec’s top court upheld a landmark ruling ordering them to pay about $15 billion to plaintiffs in two class-action lawsuits.
All legal proceedings against the companies, including lawsuits filed by provincial governments, have been paused during the negotiations. That order has now been extended until the end of January 2025.
In total, the companies faced claims of more than $1 trillion, court documents show.
In October of last year, the court instructed the mediator in the case, former Chief Justice of Ontario Warren Winkler, and the monitors appointed to each company to develop a proposed plan for a global settlement, with input from the companies and creditors.
A year later, they proposed a plan that would involve upfront payments as well as annual ones based on the companies’ net after-tax income and any tax refunds, court documents show.
The monitors estimate it would take the companies about 20 years to pay the entire amount, the documents show.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
OTTAWA – The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed a bid by the Prince Edward Island Potato Board to overturn a 2021 decision by the federal agriculture minister to declare the entire province as “a place infested with potato wart.”
That order prohibited the export of seed potatoes from the Island to prevent the spread of the soil-borne fungus, which deforms potatoes and makes them impossible to sell.
The board had argued in Federal Court that the decision was unreasonable because there was insufficient evidence to establish that P.E.I. was infested with the fungus.
In April 2023, the Federal Court dismissed the board’s application for a judicial review, saying the order was reasonable because the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said regulatory measures had failed to prevent the transmission of potato wart to unregulated fields.
On Tuesday, the Appeal Court dismissed the board’s appeal, saying the lower court had selected the correct reasonableness standard to review the minister’s order.
As well, it found the lower court was correct in accepting the minister’s view that the province was “infested” because the department had detected potato wart on 35 occasions in P.E.I.’s three counties since 2000.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick health officials are urging parents to get their children vaccinated against measles after the number of cases of the disease in a recent outbreak has more than doubled since Friday.
Sean Hatchard, spokesman for the Health Department, says measles cases in the Fredericton and the upper Saint John River Valley area have risen from five on Friday to 12 as of Tuesday morning.
Hatchard says other suspected cases are under investigation, but he did not say how and where the outbreak of the disease began.
He says data from the 2023-24 school year show that about 10 per cent of students were not completely immunized against the disease.
In response to the outbreak, Horizon Health Network is hosting measles vaccine clinics on Wednesday and Friday.
The measles virus is transmitted through the air or by direct contact with nasal or throat secretions of an infected person, and can be more severe in adults and infants.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
