Protecting Canadian Citizens

A Canadian conducts business in Nepal and then wants to cross the border into India. His driver gets through but he doesn’t: He is duped into thinking that he could go across get some money and return to Nepal, but he is arrested. He is kept in India against his will and is bribed in order to get across the border but cannot afford the money. His punishment is three years in prison. Canada has since not been able to get him out of the country.

In Sudan, an English teacher is imprisoned because of the scandal she stirs when wanting to call a doll after the name of Islam’s revered prophet, Mohammed. For all we know she could have done that as a show of respect but instead she was probably headed for a beheading because of the “insult”. As a result the British send a couple of people from Britain, one of them a respected Moslem and she is released after some consultation with the authorities.

From the above two stories one can conclude that it is better to have a British passport than a Canadian one when it comes to living abroad and having to face laws which are absurd in our country. Indeed we pride ourselves in being open-minded but what about the ability to protect our citizens abroad. I remember vaguely the inability of getting Italian authorities to recognize that I had done the equivalent of the first two years of medical school before having had to complete them again while in Italy. I had gone to Europe to study with the notion of having my rights protected and when living there, I discovered some stark indifference especially when I went to the Quebec House in order to drum up some financial support. These were not life death situations but one could only imagine what would have occurred had I been falsely arrested.

Today there is a shortage of Quebec born foreign doctors. In my mind it would have been better to have a British or American passport. Both of those countries would not have put up with the red tape nonsense and lack of representation either in Europe or anywhere else around the world when it comes to academic equivalences, funding, mistreatment and arrests. Still Canada is supposed to offer more opportunities for citizens coming from more impoverished countries and it has provided an impressive track record by allowing many foreigners to be able to relocate and create families in an independent space, they would not have been able to do at home.

.