Government Does Right By Deporting American Deserters
June 29, 2009 — Raphael Alexander
There is a ridiculously biased article in the Ottawa Citizen involving the Conservative government and their current deportation policy on U.S. Army deserters. The tone it strikes is immediate:
Jason Kenney’s most memorable assault on U.S. war deserters seeking refuge in Canada occurred soon after he became immigration minister in October 2008.
Kenney dismissed them as “bogus refugee claimants,” a phrase that set off alarm bells among the deserters’ supporters because it was more loaded than anything said before by his Tory predecessors in the job.
How is it an “assault” on anybody to state the absolute truth of the situation? These are not genuine refugees, fleeing a war-torn country or a situation in which their lives are imperiled by actions beyond their control. These were men and women who knowingly and willingly signed into service with the military with the full knowledge of their actions and the consequences of desertion. Some of them even joined up long after the Iraq war had already started.
When you join the Army, there isn’t a checkbox to enter in which wars you want to join. There isn’t a checkbox which indicates what you may or may not morally approve. When you join the Army, you sign up for service for your country. And the consequences are well known. A dishonourable discharge and a possible year in prison is the penalty for abandoning service without permission. That’s hardly a steep price to pay for weaseling out on a contract.
Still, the underlying message in the printed material dating back three years is there is no appetite for intervening politically to do for Iraqi war deserters what Pierre Trudeau did for Vietnam War draft dodgers and deserters in 1969, when his government laid out the welcome mat for both groups. There also is nothing in the documents that suggests the issue has spurred any debate within government ranks.
In a memo to Kenney in February, then-deputy minister Richard Fadden provided a thorough review of why all Iraqi war deserters’ claims for refugee status had failed so far with the Immigration and Refugee Board, the Federal Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal.
There’s a simple reason for this. The Iraq war is not the Vietnam war. And let’s be clear here: while the Vietnam war was unpopular on both sides of the border, Prime Minister Trudeau did Canada no favours by rebuking our allies and letting in the deserters. What makes that situation slightly more valid is the fact that they had, at the time, conscription, so there were many soldiers who did not want to be in Vietnam who were forced to serve. In Iraq there is nobody serving that did not sign on a dotted line. Everyone who is there deserves to be there. They all knew the risks and the consequences when they enlisted. And even during the Vietnam era, not everybody believed that resisting the war meant running to the nearest border. Muhammad Ali, the top boxer in the world at the time, refused to go to Vietnam and surrendered three years of his life to that belief. His actions then became a matter of political objection, and carried weight in the arena of opinion in his country.
As for those who left? Well, much like the current brand running away from duty, they were forgotten about, ignored, or just plain didn’t matter.
If you believe in something strongly, you don’t run away from that principle. Perhaps the Canadian border represents the U.S. Army’s greatest test of character for a soldier. Those who run for it probably wouldn’t have made a competent member of the team anyway.
Unambiguously Ambidextrous
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