I don’t make much of a secret of the fact that the warmest feeling I’ll likely ever have towards the federal government is one of clenched-teeth disdain.
While I will openly admit that government doesn’t have any monopoly on screwing up, it does excel at screwing up in a fashion that inflicts the most pain on the least guilty, and rewarding those most culpable.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than when our immigration and justice systems intersect.
In the last few months alone, we’ve witnessed an eruption of gang warfare in cities all across the country.
A large chunk of that violence involves foreign-born young men, many who are very well known to the court system.
In spite of their non-citizenship, the vast majority of these criminals are far more likely to see Bigfoot than ever be deported.
Witness the case of Calgary’s Jackie Tran.
The Vietnamese-born Tran is allegedly one of Calgary’s most notorious gangland figures.
His criminality is said to include drug and weapons-related violence, and he has violated court orders banning him from possessing weapons, or hanging out with his prohibited friends.
Because of his alleged involvement with violent crime, and lawlessness, Tran was first ordered deported back in 2004.
In spite of overwhelming evidence suggesting he be placed in custody until his deportation takes place, he remains at large in the community after losing his latest deportation order in mid-April.
This despite his habit of ignoring appearance orders in previous cases.
Tran’s case isn’t unusual.
Go back to the 1980s, when tax-funded legal teams spent years, and millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, preventing the deportation of Charles Ng and thus depriving the people of California from conducting a fair trial until it was almost too late.
Currently, every major city in the country can point to an individual or group of criminals who are non-citizens, yet routinely rotate in and out of court, apparently immune to the attention of the immigration police.
It remains a bizarre dichotomy in a country that managed to find almost unlimited resources in order to prosecute a bunch of barley farmers.
It’s equally hard to fathom our inability to deport serious bad guys, when citizens of a nearby republic know exactly what an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) bus is, what it looks like, and what it does.
Despite making it appear they aren’t really interested in deporting anyone, under any circumstance, our immigration cops do eventually succeed at ridding us of some miscreant aimed at undermining the fabric of Canadian society.
After all, we can’t be having any semi-skilled, medical aid workers violating their work visas now, can we?
By golly, we let these people go around bending the rules of their work permits, and next thing you know they’ll be selling bootleg barley to the Americans, or sporting “Palin in 2012” bumper stickers.
The point here is that there is some pretty clear evidence here that our Justice and Immigration Departments have some very serious issues going on behind the scenes.
Our provincial justice ministries have demonstrated gross inabilities to prosecute major crimes.
White collar crimes of a nature detrimental to the very fabric of good governance apparently eclipse the abilities of those who are tasked with upholding and enforcing our laws.
Serious violent crimes take years to prosecute and even then, as with Karla Homolka, we find the pursuit of justice undermined by sheer incompetence and political meddling.
In Ontario, a group of private homes has been hijacked by armed, violent thugs who seemingly possess immunity from the law despite having beaten and assaulted citizens and police.
Our Immigration Department is riddled with incompetence brought about by political interference.
How bad is it?
It was recently made public that one of our immigration adjudicators, on the job for a decade, is an outspoken supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, whose racism and violence is well documented.
On the surface, it appears that our courts are only interested in the easy hits, because serious bad guys simply put up too much of a fuss.
It’s worse over at Immigration.
It’s impossible not to imagine that a Filipina care worker got herself deported solely because getting her on a plane is a lot easier than trying to get rid of guys like Tran.
Maybe we should deport some of our immigration officials.
Bill Greenwood is a local freelance columnist.