SHE'S MY KIND OF CANADIAN

Krisztina Gal seems like the kind of person I would like to be Canadian with.

I do not know anything about her except what I have read in the newspapers.
I know that she is an Hungarian woman aged 30. I know that she came to
Canada four years ago and liked it so much that she wanted to stay. I know
that she was turned down twice by immigration authorities when she and her
boyfriend, another Hungarian named Zsolt Dudas, applied for immigrant
status. I know that she then broke the law by staying in this country
illegally.

It did not, however, cost me anything for them to be here, quietly working
in the underground economy and always living in fear of being discovered.
She worked as a baby-sitter and a cleaning lady, he worked installing
hardwood floors.

The Department of Immigration does not think that Ms Gal is the kind of
person that most Canadians would want to be Canadian with. The government
plans to deport her just as soon as they can get her on a plane. By
Canadian standards, this is pretty hasty business. The police only slapped
the handcuffs on her and threw her in jail in late December.

Last April, Ms Gal was accosted on a street in Toronto by a sexual
predator. Although she understood the kind of problems it could cause for
her as an illegal immigrant, she felt a responsibility to report the
incident to the police. In December, she was contacted by police who told
her that her description of the man who had accosted her matched the
description of a man who had sexually assaulted a young girl in the same
neighbourhood. She identified the suspected pedophile from a photograph and
she was arrested even before the alleged pervert because she was an illegal
immigrant.

On Thursday, Ms Gal was issued with a deportation order. She has been
called a heroine by Toronto media. Even the police who arrested her -- in
fairness to them, they had no choice -- think she deserves a break but the
Department of Immigration does not. I agree with the Toronto police and I
wonder what is wrong with Canada's immigration and refugee system. Early
this month, a court in British Columbia agreed to hear the appeal of a
convicted California dope user who was refused refugee status and has been
fighting his deportation for almost four years. Before "fleeing" to Canada,
Steve Kubby had been convicted of possession of peyote and magic mushrooms.
He now has, according to the website devoted to his cause, a rare form of
adrenal cancer for which he takes marijuana medically. He claims he needs
it to survive and he seeks refugee status because he cannot get it in the
United States.

Neither claim is true. Marijuana's medical value is similar to Aspirin's --
it treats some symptoms of a disease but has no curative effect. Medical
marijuana is legal in at least 11 American states, including California,
where Mr. Kubby comes from. Nevertheless, he will be enjoying the benefits
of Canada's puzzling immigration policies long after Ms Gal is trudging the
streets of her native Hungary. Rwandan war criminals, Sikh and Muslim
terrorists, American army deserters can hang on in Canada for years at the
taxpayers' expense, but the Hungarian heroine has to go.

How a country that was built on immigration can have an immigration policy
that mystifies most Canadians is a puzzlement. Last March, Public Safety
Minister Anne McLellan had to use ministerial discretion to intervene in
the case of a North Korean refugee who had been denied status by an
Immigration and Refugee Board official who had ruled that, because he had
been a minor member of the North Korean government, he was a probably a war
criminal. His wife had already been lured back to North Korea, where she
was executed. He faced certain death if he was sent back. His son would
have remained an orphan in Canada.

Ms McLellan's intervention prevented this travesty from acting out into
tragedy. That is what ministerial discretion is for -- the rules don't
always work, bureaucrats don't always get things right.

Judy Sgro resigned as immigration minister yesterday. She was accused of
using ministerial discretion not wisely, not well, and not once but twice.
The first case involved a Romanian stripper who had volunteered to work on
her campaign last year; the most recent involved accusations by another
campaign worker. It is a pity Ms Sgro did not take the opportunity to use
that discretion wisely, well and one last time before she resigned. She
could have redeemed her reputation -- at least a little bit -- by
permitting Krisztina Gal to stay in Canada. Ms Gal was turned down when she
applied to stay because immigration officials said she lacked education and
had no career and no savings. That may be true. What she does have in
abundance is courage, decency and a sense of social responsibility -- areas
in which she could give the rest of us lessons. Joe Volpe, the new
immigration minister, should waste no time in giving this woman her papers.