Two cabinet ministers have defended a decision by the immigration department to call in the RCMP to probe whether a Canadian senator used “inauthentic” travel documents to aid the evacuation of Afghan women and human rights activists fleeing the Taliban.
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“I have no doubt that everybody was working — parliamentarians, both in the House and the Senate and beyond government — were doing everything in their power to try and facilitate the process of getting people out,” Mendicino said Wednesday. Fraser said the immigration department issued its own facilitation letters to help Afghans get past army checkpoints at the airport, but only to those who’d been accepted into Canada’s special immigration program for Afghan refugees. His deputy minister, Christiane Fox, said the immigration department’s facilitation letter bears the word “visa” but is not a visa itself, merely a document to aid a traveler’s passage.
Given the potential for hundreds of letter recipients with an average of eight family members per person who would potentially also want to come, Fraser said “the idea that those people should somehow displace others who have been referred into the program based on their vulnerability is something I think we need to take seriously.”
Canada had first pledged to accept 20,000 Afghan refugees, a number later increased to 40,000. In all, so far, about 28,000 have been accepted, the minister told the committee. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner said, “Minister, you do realize the message this sends right? All of us here have had constituents who are trying to flee war zones. They didn’t have the luxury of getting these letters.”
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