Maybe it’s some sort of cosmic coincidence, but Brenda Martin, the Canadian chef that has been wasting away for over two years in a Mexican prison without a trial, has become the fifth installment in a seemingly growing series of Canadians getting into trouble abroad.
These unrelated slip-ups have forced the Harper government to walk through a minefield of potential foreign relations nightmares.
In Saudi Arabia, former Montreal resident Mohamed Kohail, 23, was sentenced to death by beheading earlier this month after being convicted of killing another young man in a schoolyard brawl.
A world away, In Thailand, Christopher Neil, a former B.C. schoolteacher, is currently on trial for allegedly sexually abusing a nine-year-old boy. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in the harsh and corrupt Thai prison system.
In the U.S., Ronald Smith awaits his execution in a jail cell in Montana for killing two aboriginal men in 1982.
And perhaps most famous of all of the cases, Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen and alleged militant, has been held as the youngest prisoner in the infamous Guantanamo Bay military base without trial since 2002.
Successive Canadian governments have asked for clemency when their citizens have been sentenced to death in foreign countries. Harper and company have tried to persuade the Saudi government to lessen the punishment against Kohail, but as of yet, the house of Saud has not backed down.
Opposition parties and a host of non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International, have argued that Harper’s lack of success with the Saudis stems from their position on the death penalty in the U.S.
Public safety minister Stockwell Day explained that the Conservatives would not, unlike previous administrations, attempt to repatriate convicted killers in democratic countries that respect the rule of law, such as our southern neighbours. Instead, the government will evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis.
Inadvertently, Day painted Saudi Arabia, a key American ally in the Middle East, as undemocratic and barbaric by appealing for Kohail’s life. Alex Neve, the secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, has claimed that the Conservative’s hypocrisy has left the Saudi government less willing to negotiate with Canadian officials.
The Conservatives have been scrambling to explain why some executions are more legal than others.
Former justice minister and current Liberal MP Irwin Cotler seized on the opportunity to pass a bill stating that the government “should stand consistently against the death penalty, as a matter of principle, both in Canada and around the world.”
Ninety-six Tory MPs voted in favour of the motion, but their swift shift could further damage the chances of saving either man’s life. To Canadians, it was a simple realigning to a more popular position; to officials in Bangkok or Riyadh, the government could appear to be inconsistent and confused.
Why would these foreign governments risk the ire of their people for letting tourists off with lesser punishments when the very administration asking for them can’t remember how it feels about murderers and pedophiles from one day to the next?
Foreign policy, as with poker, is as much about the appearance of strength as it is about the actual. Unfortunately for Kohail and Smith, regardless of their crimes, the Tories had been gambling for a full house but instead could end up with a flush – of embarrassment.