I think trying to discern differences between multi-cultural which means “including people who have different customs and beliefs” and melting pot “an environment in which many ideas and races are socially assimilated” is a true exercise in futility.
There is and has been for quite some time policies in Canada that invite terrorist to come there. This is not a knock on Canadian’s. I am American but my family is Canadian. I have nothing but admiration for the Candian people.
This is a story that ran in the Toronto Star on April 15, 1999. It is poignant and chilling to read today.
Lax border laws `court disaster', critics warn
Security experts slam Canada's liberal policies
by Kathleen Kenna
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."
Please Scroll Down to See Forums Below 
