The Comment Factory

Omar Khadr, Canadian citizen who has been held at Guantanamo Bay since he was 15.

US President Barack Obama’s decision to close Guantánamo Bay has been well received by many Canadians, and may prompt a shift in the Harper government’s policy towards Omar Khadr news sources reported today. Khadr is Canadian citizen and the last foreign national left in the notorious detention center in Cuba. Guantánamo has been decried by numerous Canadian organizations as essentially a torture camp.

The Harper government has stood out among western countries for not demanding its one citizen in Guantánamo, who was a child soldier on arrest, be repatriated back to Canada. Earlier this month Amnesty International Canada welcomed the announcement to suspend military commission hearings at Guantánamo. On Wednesday, the Canadian government said it was “reassessing” its position towards Khadr.

Harper, who brought Canada into closer relations with the Bush administration, is widely perceived to be intransigent on the issue. This Thursday several Canadian newspapers printed a cartoon of him sleeping on a coach under the heading “PM changes position on Khadr.” The next image shows him lying in the opposite direction, still asleep. Bring Omar Home, a coalition of NGOs, peace and other progressive groups has issued an immediate action alert to call the Prime Minister.

Opinion polls since this summer, when videos of Khadr’s interrogations were released, suggest that Khadr’s treatment has scandalized Canadians across the country. Numerous labour and democratic organizations, the British and Canadian Bar associations, all three Canadian opposition parties as well as the Greens and Communists, and other civil society groups, have called for his immediate return.

The young man, born in Toronto, was swept up in a whirl-wind not of his own making, then wounded and captured during the US invasion of Afghanistan (when he was 15). Arrested under the Bush administration’s new and highly controversial charge of “illegal enemy combatant” he has since spent most of his time in solitary confinement in Guantánamo.

On Wednesday his case, already widely discredited, unraveled further when it was proven that testimony about Maher Arar being in Afghanistan, elicited from Khadr through sleep deprivation and other forms of torture, was completely false. (Arar, another Canadian Muslim, was arrested by US officials as a terror suspect, sent Syria and tortured for a year. A royal commission later cleared his name.)

Although Obama has not made any official comment about Khadr, the actions of the new US President will likely garner a cautious optimism in Canada by labour and progressives. As the left newspaper Peoples Voice wrote, Obama’s historic victory “offers openings and problems” for Canadians, especially around his policies to extend the Afghan war and deploy more troops.

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While some, like the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom, have noted that Obama might be considered a Red Tory in Canada, others have seen the new President as “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” as Obama himself once described his image. In many Canadian cities, students and workers stopped to watch Obama’s inauguration while “Yes We Can” has been echoed at protests and on picket lines over the past months.

Despite such Obamania, however, a survey this week by Ipsos-Reid for Canwest News Service and Global National found that 71 percent of respondents believe Canada should say no if Obama requests an extension of the Canadian combat mission in Afghanistan. Obama’s first international visit will be to Ottawa, and will likely be marked by protests of a different nature than those greeting George Bush.

Still, Obama’s inauguration has been met with enthusiasm by many Canadians, not least in the African American community. The fact that this isn’t the first time that African-Americans and their leaders have inserted themselves at critical junctures in US history to expand democracy been lost on Canadian blacks. Black Canadians themselves still face persistent social and economic racism in housing, employment and education.

As Nova Scotian Black Senator Donald Oliver wrote in an open statement on Obama’s election:

“Most Canadians also don’t know that segregation remained the order of the day for Blacks in Canada during much of the 20th century. During the First World War, Black men were denied the opportunity of serving their country in the regular army. They were instead relegated to a special construction battalion.

Black women were not allowed to train as nurses alongside white women until the Toronto Negro Veterans Association and the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People put pressure on nursing schools in the late 1940s.  In Ontario, the last segregated school only closed its doors in 1965.  And as late as 1968, Black people were denied the right of burial in some Nova Scotia cemeteries.”

In bitter irony, three buses carrying young black Canadians on their way to see Obama swore into office were detained for seven hours at the U.S. border on Monday as their passports were checked and rechecked. Trip organizer Tyrone Edwards, who is with the cultural youth programme The Remix Project, pointed to religious and racial stereotyping. “There was no legitimate reason to hold us up,” he told the Toronto Star. The buses were eventually let through.