First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
For a period of about 16 months starting in 2021, Pakistani national Zain Haq was one of the central figures in a series of massively disruptive illegal road blockades targeting the Vancouver area.
In court proceedings, Crown prosecutors tallied up the damage: Tens of thousands of transit buses, delivery drivers and motorists snarled in traffic for hours on end. Emergency vehicles unable to access St. Paul’s Hospital. Travellers missing flights out of Vancouver International, the country’s second-busiest airport, because Haq and others were blocking the access road.
Haq wasn’t only violating the law, but the terms of the student visa on which he had entered the country in 2019. Haq wasn’t meeting academic requirements, according to the Canada Border Services Agency. And — like all international students — he had entered Canada pledging to abide by the law and to leave once the terms of his study were complete.
His blockades violated court injunctions and — in some instances — Haq was violating his own release conditions. His August 2022 blockade of Vancouver’s Cambie Street Bridge managed to violate two separate release conditions at the same time: He’d been barred from being on the bridge following his arrest at an earlier blockade, and he’d been released from immigration detention just a few weeks prior on the condition that he not organize any more blockades.
And now – with only days to go until a long-delayed deportation to his native Pakistan – Haq, 24, is describing his treatment as “Kafkaesque” and is once again calling on the Trudeau government to bail him out at the 11th hour.
In a Monday statement published by the Green Party of Canada, Haq said that if deported, it will mean that “many in my generation will be further disillusioned with the possibility of having their voices heard in Canada.” He also said the prospect of being separated from his Canadian wife Sophie Papp was “devastating.”
At a Vancouver press conference this week alongside Haq, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said: “For God’s sake, Marc and David, stop this deportation.” The “Marc and David” was referring to Immigration Minister Marc Miller and Public Safety Minister David McGuinty.
Haq was supposed to have been removed from Canada last April, but he was granted a last-minute reprieve by someone within the Trudeau government. Shortly before the deadline, he received a cryptic call from the office of Liberal MP Joyce Murray, followed by a CBSA case officer telling him his removal order had been quashed.
Haq told reporters this week that he believes the reprieve came by way of Miller. “It is our understanding that Minister Miller intervened,” he said.
Haq had been kept in the country with a temporary resident permit, and has said that although he sent in an application for its renewal, his deportation order was reactivated after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said they’d never received it. He’s scheduled for removal on Jan. 25.
“Haq is not a violent criminal, and his mischievous convictions do not meet the legal threshold for serious criminality,” his lawyer, Randall Cohn, said in a statement. “He has made a lawful application for permanent residence as the spouse of a Canadian citizen, and he has properly applied to extend the temporary status that was granted to him in April. This deportation is entirely avoidable, resulting from IRCC’s inability to locate his application.”
Haq’s case has been championed not only by May, but a cross-section of B.C. environmental groups.
The five blockades on which Haq faced mischief charges had been organized in conjunction with three groups who actively employ illegal methods of “civil resistance” such as road and rail blockades.
Extinction Rebellion seeks the immediate end to all fossil fuel use. Stop Fracking Around is a group that sought to impede construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline. And Save Old Growth helped coordinate blockades to halt planned logging in Vancouver Island’s Fairy Creek watershed.
The University of British Columbia’s Centre for Climate Justice has previously led a letter-writing campaign to stop Haq’s removal, saying “climate justice is unachievable without migrant justice and basic political freedoms.” The environmentalist publication The Narwhal wrote this week that “Canada could become one of the first countries to ever deport a climate activist.”
Even Haq’s sentencing judge was noticeably sympathetic. In a July 2023 decision sentencing Haq to 61 days of house arrest, B.C. Judge Reginald Harris called his environmental zeal “laudable,” and described him as an “intelligent, motivated young person.”
Nevertheless, Harris said it was clear that Haq knew what he was doing. “He knowingly and deliberately broke the law and he did so fully aware of the consequences and the impact that his actions would have on innocent parties.”
The sentence was lighter than what prosecutors had been seeking; they’d wanted Haq to spend 90 days in jail.
But Harris, in line with Canadian sentencing law, gave Haq a lighter sentence in part because he wasn’t a Canadian citizen. Judges are required to weigh the “potential immigration consequences” to foreign nationals, and to consider it as part of their overall punishment for a criminal conviction.
B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad struck a much different tone than May on the Haq case, saying in a Tuesday social media post, “enough with this nonsense. If you come to B.C. to study — you shouldn’t be breaking the law here. Deport him back to Pakistan.”
IN OTHER NEWS
The NDP is continuing to hint that no matter who the next Liberal leader is, they’re going to destroy them at the next available opportunity when the House of Commons reconvenes in late March. “We will be voting to bring down the government at the earliest opportunity,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh told CTV on Monday. However, Singh also has a lengthy track record of making empty threats against the Trudeau government.
The recruiting crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces is now so bad that more than half of the military’s ships, aircraft and other hardware can’t be used because there’s nobody around to maintain it. And so, they’ve dropped their medical standards to start admitting recruits with asthma, severe allergies and minor mental health problems such as anxiety and ADHD. This follows not long after the Canadian Armed Forces dropping its dress code standards in a similar bid to attract more hires. You can now be an asthmatic Canadian soldier with green hair, ear spacers and press-on nails.
Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.