LAX BORDER LAWS `COURT DISASTER,' CRITICS WARN

Security experts slam Canada's liberal policies

WASHINGTON - Canadians and Americans are ``courting disaster'' because
lax laws and low budgets open their shared border to terrorists,
smugglers and other criminals, experts warn.

``Terrorist groups locate in Canada in part because of Canada's
liberal visa and asylum laws,'' Michael Bromwich, inspector-general of
the U.S. Justice Department told a Congress committee yesterday.

``To ignore this problem on our border is courting disaster,'' said
Dale Brandland, a Washington state sheriff.

``It will take one incident like we saw in Oklahoma City to create the
kind of disaster I'm talking about,'' he said, referring to the 1995
bombing of a government building by American Timothy McVeigh that
killed 168 and injured 850.

Canada took hits from almost everyone at a public hearing on
cross-border immigration problems, including a Canadian spy expert.

``The largely untold truth is that Canada and terrorism do go
together,'' Ottawa security analyst David Harris told Congress
members. Canadians are so complacent in their ``peaceable kingdom''
that they ignore the growth of terrorism in their own country, he said.

He gave examples of ``homelands-connected'' violence, from the Air
India bombing that killed 329 people in 1985, to Molotov cocktails
hurled at the U.S. consulate in Toronto at an anti-NATO protest last
month.

``Terrorism is alive and well and living in Canada and it's the
obligation of the Canadian government to emphasize that fact to the
Canadian people,'' said Harris, former strategic planning chief for
CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) and now a private
business consultant who assesses security threats.

Americans told the committee that Canada is a magnet for such men as
Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, serving a life sentence for planning to bomb
the New York subway in mid-1997. He was caught three times trying to
enter the U.S. illegally from Canada - mostly through British Columbia
parks into Washington state - and twice returned voluntarily to Canada.

Canadian immigration officials refused to accept him the third
time.

The U.S. has so few border agents and is so lax on background checks
of illegal immigrants that ``it's surprising that Mezer was
apprehended once, much less three times,'' Bromwich said. ``No
terrorism checks are performed either by INS (Immigration and
Naturalization Service) or by the department of state on the vast
majority of asylum-seekers.''

Committee chair Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, denied suggestions
from Democrat committee members that he's trying to fuel anti-Canadian
sentiment to win support for controversial border controls.

Smith is a strong advocate of Section 110, an immigration law change
that would make border checks mandatory for everyone crossing the
Canada-U.S. border. The law was postponed by President Bill Clinton
until 2001, after Canadian Ambassador Raymond Chrtien and others
convinced him it would lead to day-long traffic jams and billions of
dollars in lost business.

There are only 289 U.S. border patrol agents on the Canada-U.S.
border, compared to 7,357 along the U.S.-Mexico border, said union
president Mark Hall from Detroit.

Yet trafficking in drugs and illegal immigrants has exploded, experts
said.

A decade ago, there was ``very little alien-or drug-smuggling
activity along the (B.C.-Washington) border,'' said Eugene Davis,
deputy chief of the U.S. border patrol in Blaine, Wash.. ``Illegal
smuggling (now) takes place daily.''

U.S. agents charge two-way drug traffic is booming, with homegrown
``B.C. Bud'' marijuana a big lure along the U.S. West Coast, because
it's more powerful than Mexican marijuana. Border seizures increased
600 per cent in 1998.