…Canada needs them just to criminally investigate the machinations of the former Liberal government and its various appointees, to say nothing of the Svend Robinsons of our world and other common thieves.
The Montreal Gazette isn’t done being ticked about the Liberals’ criminal judicial appointee to our country’s Immigration and Refugee Board, Yves Bourbonnais. Nor should they or any Canadian media be. Notwithstanding that, the selectively inquisitive Canadian media has already totally dismissed the case against the Liberals of Canada and are now redoubling their efforts in favor of righting more tantalizing wrongs committed in this country—like the poll suggesting that 70 percent of Canadians think the Harper Conservatives are doing a fine job.
(Hat tip: Maureen)
A good start, but how far has the rot spread?
The Gazette
Published: Monday, July 03, 2006Yves Bourbonnais has been sentenced to six years in prison, which sounds about right. The man is a disgrace; he dishonoured himself and his office and he undermined the authority of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board. He deserves jail time.
But the way Bourbonnais’s case was settled was not as satisfying as the sentence. By pleading guilty to 15 counts of obstruction of justice and 15 counts of conspiracy to obstruct justice, Bourbonnais saved the government the cost of a trial but prevented a full public airing of this whole unsavoury venture.
What we do know from court documents is distressing enough. Bourbonnais, a lawyer who was appointed to the IRB in 1996 by then-immigration minister Lucienne Robillard, accepted bribes from refugee claimants who were facing deportation and who were desperate to stay in the country or from people who had failed to get permission for their relatives to immigrate. In fact, Bourbonnais solicited the bribes through a pair of accomplices to whom he would inform which cases would be coming before him.
Some of Bourbonnais’s victims paid as much as $15,000 for a favourable ruling. Six of them handed over a total of more than $33,000. The size of Bourbonnais’s cut of the bribes amounted to is unknown, but that’s just one of the unanswered questions the sudden guilty plea has left in its wake.
Some of the people Bourbonnais helped – for a fee – were simply trying to get relatives accepted as immigrants, but others were facing deportation for criminal activity. What happened to the latter group? Are they still at large in Canada, or have they been corralled and sent home? We also hope that Immigration Canada is re-examining the cases of those relatives Bourbonnais let into the country.
And then there’s the question of Bourbonnais himself. This isn’t his first brush with the law. He was convicted of breach of trust in 1988 for selling government-owned office furniture from a prosecutor’s office and two courthouses. He was pardoned, but surely Robillard should have known that the man to whom she was entrusting the fate of hundreds of refugees and immigrants had been convicted for being untrustworthy.
Finally – and most important – there’s the question of just how far the rot has spread. This is hardly the first time the IRB has fallen under a shadow. In 2000, board official Clifford Fox was charged with accepting fees for improperly granting dozens of immigrants from countries of the former Soviet Union access to the IRB’s fast track toward refugee status. Fox was acquitted, but his wife, Natalia Zimenko, a Russian-language translator, pleaded guilty to three charges of abuse of public trust.
The way Canada processes immigrants and the way it handles refugee claims are two of the more volatile issues on the national agenda. Canadians need to have faith that the system in place is untainted by scandal or corruption. And frankly, that will take more than a simple guilty plea from one official. What we need is a complete accounting of this ugly scheme, either from the RCMP or the IRB itself.
No wonder most of the liberal media want to bury this story…
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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