Canada gets picky: An interview with a banished U.S. activist and former resident of Canada

author : Sergei Holmes | Alison Bodine topic : Canada | Interview

by Sergei Holmes

[Canada is often thought of as our peaceful, docile neighbor to the north. Even a potential enclave to retreat to when the United States becomes intolerable to live in. However, the reality is quite different with internal problems there reflecting the glaring social inadequacies we face. Acceptance of immigrants is one of the most pertinent to those in the US Northwest and Canada’s policies are becoming more adamantly conservative with each passing year.

US soldiers who desert the army and come to Canada eager to claim refugee status are denied and ordered to leave the country. Activists crossing the border learn by the experience of rejection that they may wish to emphasize the ‘happy tourist’ angle to their trip instead of the political rally they might accidentally stumble into.

For US citizen Alison Bodine, the case was neither as her long-term student residence in Canada for over four years to earn her bachelor’s degree had led to many routine border crossings. In that time, Bodine became affiliated with Vancouver political student groups at the campus of her university (University of British Columbia) and eventually Mobilization Against War & Occupation (MAWO) and Cuba solidarity groups.

On the night of Sept. 10, 2007, Bodine was crossing into Canada and her political materials were confiscated. On Sept. 13th, when Bodine came back to claim her items and return to the United States, she was arrested by Canada Border Services Agency. She was charged with misrepresentation and banned from Canada for two years effective midnight Nov. 17, 2007. At the border, 30 minutes before her designated banishment, a Canadian border patrol officer greeted her cryptically with the words “We’ve been waiting for you.”]

Sergei Holmes: Was there anything that you had experienced crossing the border or something that you had heard vicariously about crossing the border that would have led you to conclude what was going to happen to you?

Alison Bodine: Not explicitly. Historically, people have been more concerned coming from Canada going into the United States about what the border guards are going to say to them about political materials or how intensely they’re going to question them about things like beliefs. But going into Canada I’ve never been too concerned going into the border. That’s kind of illogical based on the fact that Canada has the same immigration laws. Canada turns away an astounding amount of immigrant and refugees based on the color of their skin or religion. It’s something that should have been expected but maybe wasn’t so much expected. I’ve heard cases of literature not being allowed in because it was printed in the United States but what I had with me was stuff that was, for the most part, printed in Canada. So that wasn’t an excuse they could use and it wasn’t something we were expecting to have to face.

SH: What type of support did you receive from your friends and groups that you were already organized with, and to what extent did that affect the media coverage of the case?

AB: I was arrested late at night. People were on guard because I had gone back to collect things at the border, I was having to talk to the [CBS] agents again and we weren’t exactly sure what was going to happen. So I went with a friend and he was able to make the phone call to say, “Alison’s been arrested.”

People immediately gathered from the anti-war coalition that I work with [and] the Cuba solidarity groups I work with, organizing for a defense campaign. I was told not a whole lot in the beginning: why I was arrested, why I was being taken to a prison in Surrey for the night. So that’s all the information that we had and [my support] began organizing for all the possibilities if I was to be held in prison, or held in immigration holding, thinking and brainstorming what might exist in Canadian law and immigration law that had caused my arrest to happen. Using your one phone call, your right to talk to a lawyer, I was able to relay to them all the information I got at every point. I communicated with them that I had been told I would be awaiting an admissibility hearing and detention review, that I would be in immigration holding for the next four days.

And then they began doing real organizing. Calling members of the community, making a callout for demonstrations at the Immigration offices in downtown Vancouver. So there was a demonstration at those immigration offices of about 60 people that Friday demanding my release. Through this demonstration, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio was alerted to my case and I was able to do an interview with someone that evening that aired at 6:00. Immigration officials arrived that morning to release me at about 8:00 that night. Gave me my release papers, said, “We’re holding your detention review right now, there it is, we’re not holding you any more.” And that’s when the Alison Bodine defense committee started.

For the next two months, it formed as a coalition of community members from all different backgrounds coming together in order to raise awareness of my case, about the case of other immigrants and refugees under attack in Canada right now, about the broadness of immigration law, how it allows people to be attacked on the base of their beliefs, on their religion, on the color of their skin, and how in this case it had been the political targeting of an activist within Vancouver but not a Canadian citizen.

Now there is a petition campaign to have the ban against me lifted in which we’re looking for 10,000 signatures delivered to the Immigration Minister of Canada who can lift the ban against me. They also got a lot of support from letter writing. People who would write support letters to the Minister in Charge of [CBSA] (who were charging me) as well as send them to the defense committee so that we could have a logging of them as well. And we got support from the Canadian Federation of Students, multiple unions including the Hospital Employees Union which is 40,000 plus workers in British Columbia, different community organizations, No One is Illegal in Toronto came out to support. Really just groups from all different sorts of backgrounds.

It was an effective defense campaign. It raised a lot of awareness in newspapers, daily media coverage, cover stories, also in independent newspapers, like Spanish language newspapers that run in Vancouver. Radio as well. There’s a co-op radio station as well as the major radio stations in Vancouver really jumped on to the case because of its sensational aspects (at least for the major media). Because I was a US citizen that had been turned away from Canada, had had things seized, was now being arrested for being an anti-war activist and had been politically targeted. I had been able to have those networks to have been able to call and we were able to respond quickly unlike so many people that are turned away everyday that don’t know anybody in Canada yet but are equally turned away for unjustifiable reasons. I think the defense committee did a lot of effective work in raising public awareness, putting pressure on [CBSA].

SH: At this point, although the legal process has just begun, what particular people will you begin focusing on?

AB: On the legal side, we’ve had to have hearings and had to hire lawyers. And now we’re at the stage where we want to take the case to a federal court appeal. Bring it in front of the Federal Court of Canada which requires preparing documents and submitting them. Then the Federal Court decides whether they want to hear the case and then they make their decision. The court can take an indefinite amount of time to rule either to make a ruling to hear the case or to rule whether the charges against me should be overturned and the ban against me lifted. So the process could take more than two years if they chose to make it that way.

I think it’s important that [this] continues hand-in-hand with the political campaign. That we’re still collecting these 10,000 signatures because the federal court is going to know about all these things and be aware of all the community support I have and we’ll use those as well to put pressure on Immigration Minister Diane Finley. She can decide, at any time, to lift the ban against me and let me back into the country.

SH: With that name, is that someone that people in the United States could focus on in terms of direct advocacy for your case and what other aspects could people do to help support your trial?

AB: Definitely. I think the big thing is continuing the petition campaign in which signatures from people in the United States are equally as important as signatures from people in Canada. It’s about showing the immigration minister that I have public support. That people know what’s going on, that they know what [CBSA] did, what Canada immigration did in banning a political activist from Canada. Collecting and gathering signatures for me is great, also continuing to write letters to Diane Finley and forwarding them on to the defense campaign so that we know they’re being written is another important step. Just so that my name remains on her desk so that she realizes this is a name she’s going to be have to be dealing with. Also basic awareness. Just telling people about what happened.

SH: In what ways can what happened to you serve as a warning for people crossing the border from either side based on the information that you had in the past combined with your own experience. What is it activists coming from both countries should be more aware of now?

AB: What happened to me we have to see as an escalation of what’s been a long history of policy at the border. An escalation in that I’m a US citizen they chose to target and ban from Canada. It came at a time when they were also increasingly interrogating US war resisters (soldiers who were entering Canada from the United States in order to claim refugee status) because they were resisting the war in Iraq as well as they banned Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright who are activists from Code Pink in the United States. Overall, it was a test for the government of Canada as to how people would respond. And because people responded strongly, in the case of war resisters, in the case of Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright, I think everyone should be aware that it’s something that could happen. If you cross the borders with political materials, the laws are written and are so broad that they can charge you with misrepresentation. There has been an escalation and they’ll be willing to take it farther in the future and they’ll have to because the government of Canada and the government of the United States are increasingly having to deal with dissent and this is one way in which they’re going to try and cut that down and try to discourage people from getting involved.

To find out more information about Bodine’s case (and other immigrants), and to get involved with Alison’s campaign, visit http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com