My name is James Kafieh. I'm legal counsel for three intervenors in the Iacobucci inquiry. I'm representing the three of them here today. They include the Canadian Arab Federation, the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association, and the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations. These organizations have been active for a very long time on the issues that are before you.
The Canadian Arab Federation, as early as 1991 during the first Gulf War, found itself targeted by CSIS activity in our community. This brochure that I hold before you is from a production that we made during that war. It's entitled When CSIS Calls, and it's basically a civil liberties guide, so that Arab Canadians, and Canadians in general, will know what their rights are and how best to contribute to national security without endangering the fabric of their communities or threatening their own personal security. This is something that the Canadian Arab Federation produced.
The Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association has been involved with issues of racial profiling since its founding a decade ago.
The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations was active on Maher Arar's file since October 12, 2002, when the first media stories on it hit The New York Times and The Globe and Mail. On that day, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations was very much at the forefront of that effort and were very explicit in pointing out from that very initial point that if Maher Arar were to be sent to Syria he would be at risk of torture, and they were actively trying to confirm Mr. Arar's whereabouts.
As a combined population of Arab and Muslim Canadians, we number about one million. These institutions above that I represent in turn represent the interests and concerns of these communities. Taken separately, or even put together, however you want to look at them, the Arab and Muslim communities are two of the largest and fastest-growing communities in Canada. They have a population spread throughout the urban centres of Canada, but in particular in ridings in Ontario and Quebec.
The issues that are before us today have had a profound impact on the Arab Canadian community. We have a special interest in the success of the O'Connor and the Iacobucci inquiries, whose work is not done until their recommendations are implemented. We understand the Middle East better than any other community in this country, because we speak the language of the Arab world and we monitor the broadcasts and read the publications and we travel there. We do so at a greater rate for obvious reasons: we have connections to that part of the world. We are, as such, at the greatest risk when we travel there.
We're at the greatest risk of recklessly being labelled extremists, a term that Justice Iacobucci found to have no real definition. It meant whatever the author wanted it to mean, without standards on something so important, where labelling alone could get you.... Well, in fact it had a profound impact on having people incarcerated in dungeons and tortured—Canadians.
We are at increased danger from a lack of security and the way the security agencies do their work. The Arab Canadian community lost confidence in Canadian security agencies in large measure from the experience of Maher Arar. And when we saw the treatment of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati, and Muayyed Nureddin, we understood this was a pattern, that it wasn't just a one-off event but a pattern. And we see the abuse of other Arab Canadians today in other parts of the world—they've already been mentioned—in terms of their perplexing inability to return, with the help of the Canadian government, back to Canada.
It calls into question, for us, the quality and substance of the Canadian citizenship held by an Arab or Muslim Canadian. Can we count on our government to be there? Can we count on our security agencies to protect us like any other Canadian would want to be protected?
We need, as a community, to see evidence of the implementation of all 23 recommendations of the O'Connor report. It's critical that we see it. This shouldn't be something done in secret. It's important for Canada to come clean and to start anew, in terms of building relationships with the communities that are perhaps more critical right now for us to have a good relationship with, so that there is confidence, for example, between the Arab and Muslim communities and Canadian security agencies.
Security is everybody's business. We need to be working together, and it makes it very difficult when we don't see the accountability.
We don't see any aspect of remorse. It's important, in particular, in terms of the recommendations for the Arab and Muslim community—I would certainly refer to 17, 19, 20, and 22. They are on record from the O'Connor recommendations.
But the oversight process is perhaps one of the most important things that has been left undone, because without that, where do Arab Canadians go for redress? Where do they go for answers? How do they protect their citizenship? Do we have to have a royal commission every time this happens? Is this the normal procedure, the standard operating procedure for dealing with these issues? I would argue that for obvious reasons this is not practical. It's not the way a responsible administration would conduct itself. We have to have something that's systematic. It's been studied. It's clear what needs to be done. Justice O'Connor laid it out very clearly, and we don't understand why it hasn't happened already. It calls into question the seriousness of the Canadian government, the level of commitment to fulfill what's needed, what's obviously been found to be needed.
When we talk about also doing what's right, it's important that there be remorse, remorse in terms of the role Canadians did play in the detention and torture of these men. There is an obvious requirement that was explicitly recommended by Justice O'Connor in the case of Mahar Arar, but which Justice Iacobucci was not allowed to recommend. He was only allowed to make findings without recommending, in terms of what the government should do. But the pattern is laid out. An explicit apology to these three men is still outstanding, and beyond that there is an issue of compensation. Without compensation, as well, for the ordeal they went through, the apology will ring hollow.
It's important for Canada, in addition, to protest to Syria and Egypt the fact that there has been no accountability for what their administrations did to these Canadians. It is not something we can do in a credible way, to reach out to these governments and chastise them while we still haven't come to terms with what our own inquiries have revealed need to be done. We have to come to terms, and the obvious thing is to settle up and provide open evidence that the 23 recommendations of Justice O'Connor have been applied and, where there is an obvious application, that those same recommendations—for example an apology and compensation—be applied to the three men who were the subject to the Iacobucci inquiry.