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When Canada was a serious country, we used to deport dangerous people even if there was a war on. We didn’t care if we were sending someone who was a danger to Canada back to a war zone; the main concern of our government was that the person being kicked out was a danger to Canada.

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We used to pay people to drop dangerous fake refugee claimants or illegal immigrants back in their own country and let them figure it out. Frankly, that’s how it should be now.

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This week, as debate around kicking out members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was heating up, a federal bureaucrat said we can’t deport anyone to Iran due to a lack of flights.

Lack of flights being used as an excuse

Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho had asked Brett Bush, the executive director of the Immigration and Asylum Policy Innovation Division at the Canada Border Services Agency, why so many members of the IRGC had been ordered deported but only one had been removed.

“What exactly is preventing the CBSA from removing these individuals that have already gone through the IRB due process that exists?” Ho said.

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“I can tell you what one of the big problems today, on today’s date, would be is access to flights into Iran,” Bush responded.

That would be an acceptable answer if deporting members of Iran’s hardline, radical and oppressive IRGC were an issue that just came up in the last week or so after the bombing of Iran had started. But it’s been an ongoing issue for years and some of these officials — high-ranking ones, too — were ordered deported years ago, yet they remain in Canada.

The Liberals under Justin Trudeau dragged their heels on naming the IRGC a terrorist group, even though they were responsible for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 with 55 Canadians, another 30 permanent residents and at least 45 others with connections to Canada on board. We have been letting high-ranking Iranian officials into Canada for years, but have been slow to remove them and fast to protect them by keeping their names and identities out of the media.

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Officials avoid answering basic questions

As Bush and Manon Brassard, the CEO of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, appeared to respond to questions from MPs, they showed themselves to be two of the most useless public servants to appear before a committee. While Brassard could answer the odd question but often didn’t, Bush’s favourite answer was that he didn’t know.

How two senior civil servants could appear before a committee and not come equipped to answer basic questions is beyond me. We can all understand someone replying that they will get back to you with details to complex questions at a later date, but if you can’t answer the most basic questions that you and your staff should have anticipated, then it’s time to retire.

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As for being a serious country on this issue, when Conservatives were in office over a decade ago, we weren’t against flying people back to their home country, landing a plane on a remote airfield, shoving them out and then taking off again.

It’s not our problem how some criminal feels when we send them back; the job of the government is to protect Canadians.

Problem residents have been booted before

In 2012, Saeed Ibrahim Jama was ordered deported after being convicted of drug trafficking and obstruction of justice. He had also failed to appear for legal proceedings.

So CBSA put him on a plane, escorted him to Kenya and then paid a Kenyan team to fly him into Somalia, land on an airfield, get him off the plane and take off again. If we could do that then with drug dealers, we could do that now with IRGC officials.

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The problem is officials are too weak to do it and they know they won’t be backed up by the Liberal government if they were to try.

Right now officials are saying we can’t send IRGC officials back due to a lack of flights. How long until they are saying we can’t send them back because the regime has changed and they might face jail time.

Canada should not be the dumping ground for the problems of other countries, but that is what we are allowing ourselves to become if we won’t act on IRGC officials living in our midst.

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