History > 2006 > Canada

Mike Graston

The Windsor Star

Ontario, Canada

15.9.2006

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/graston.asp

Gay Marriage

Galvanizes Canada’s Religious Right

November 19, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MASON

OTTAWA — It was a lonely time here in the capital for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada in the early days of the gay marriage debate in 2003.

Of the scattered conservative Christian groups opposed to extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, it was the only one with a full-time office in Ottawa to lobby politicians. “We were the only ones here,” said Janet Epp Buckingham, who was the group’s public policy director then.

But that was before the legislation passed in 2005 allowing gay marriage in Canada. And before the election early this year of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative and an evangelical Christian who frequently caps his speeches with “God bless Canada.”

Today across the country, the gay marriage issue and Mr. Harper’s election have galvanized conservative Christian groups to enter politics like never before.

Before now, the Christian right was not a political force in this mostly secular, liberal country. But it is coalescing with new clout and credibility, similar to the evangelical Christian movement in the United States in the 1980s, though not nearly on the same scale.

Today, half a dozen organizations like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada work full time in Ottawa, four of which opened offices in the past year, all seeking to reverse the law allowing gay marriage.

They represent just some of the dozens of well-organized conservative Christian groups around the country and more than a hundred grass-roots campaigns focused on the issue. In recent months, religious groups have held rallies, signed petitions, drafted resolutions and stepped up their efforts to lobby politicians to overturn the law.

These Christian conservatives have been instilled with a sense of urgency in the expectation that Mr. Harper will follow through on a campaign promise, as early as the first week of December, to hold a vote in Parliament on whether to revisit the gay marriage debate.

“With the legalization of gay marriage, faith has been violated and we’ve been forced to respond,” said Charles McVety, a leader of several evangelical Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage and president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto.

“Traditionally people of faith in Canada have not been politically active,” he said. “But now we’re finally seeing organizations that are professionalizing what was a very amateur political movement.”

Mr. McVety, who recites from memory the decision of an Ontario judge in 2003 that paved the way for gay marriages, has organized dozens of rallies attracting altogether some 200,000 supporters.

He asked the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other American evangelical leaders for advice on building a religious movement in Canada and traveled Ontario and Quebec in a red-and-white “Defend Marriage” bus.

Though the expected vote in Parliament will not decide whether to rescind the gay marriage legislation, but instead whether members wish to reopen the issue for debate, it remains significant for the Christian right and the government.

For leaders of the Christian right, the vote is a chance to get the marriage issue back on the government’s agenda and to get a better sense of where individual politicians, especially newly elected ones, stand. They have adopted that strategy in part because they say that the vote in Parliament will be difficult to win.

For Mr. Harper and his Conservative Party, the vote is an attempt to appease the religious social conservatives who form the core of the support for his minority government without losing moderate voters who want to avoid the issue.

If Mr. Harper appears to be too aggressive in pushing to revisit gay marriage he also risks losing votes in Quebec, where his pro-Israel stance and an environmental plan that does not meet Canada’s Kyoto Protocol commitments have already hurt his support in a province that is critical to his chances of securing a majority in the next election.

“Harper needs to show he is not the right-wing evangelical’s rump if he wants to grow into a majority government,” said Jonathan Malloy, a political science professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who studies the politics of evangelical Christians in Canada.

Mr. Harper’s government has not introduced an avalanche of socially conservative measures, but has instead shifted subtly to the right, one policy at a time.

In addition to derailing Liberal measures to loosen marijuana and prostitution laws, Mr. Harper has introduced tougher crime legislation, bolstered the military with new money and equipment, lowered the national sales tax and plans to raise the age of sexual consent to 16 from 14.

But the Christian right wants more and realizes a lot is at stake in the marriage question.

“Let’s say there’s a vote and the issue dissipates from the agenda in the same way abortion has faded away,” Mr. Malloy said. “Then they won’t have a clear-cut issue they can strongly organize on. They’re developing a base here but they need something to organize and keep the funds going.”

The Christian movement’s leaders are discussing how to sustain the momentum and growth spurred in the campaign against gay marriage. They agree that one issue is not enough to fuel a long-term movement. But they disagree on how to carry the momentum of the marriage campaign into other socially conservative issues like euthanasia and polygamy.

Fueling their hopes for sustaining the movement are polling figures from last winter’s election that show an identifiable bloc of religious voters, mainly evangelicals and Catholics, supporting the Conservative Party.

In a country where church attendance has dropped to about 20 percent of the population from about 60 percent since the 1940s, the Christian right hopes the polling numbers convince politicians there are still enough votes to be won by championing socially conservative issues.

But the experience of Canada’s abortion debate in the 1980s and early 90s looms ominously over optimism that the movement can be broadened beyond gay marriage.

At the time, evangelical leaders formed groups, raised money and drew significant support in an effort to establish stiff laws against abortion. In 1989, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced legislation banning abortions in cases where the health of the mother was not at risk but the bill failed in the Senate and never became law.

Soon after, the evangelical political movement disbanded, remaining relatively dormant until the gay marriage issue arose.

“When the abortion legislation died everyone just went home and all the momentum was lost,” said Joseph C. Ben-Ami, executive director of the conservative Institute for Canadian Values, which opened an office in Ottawa last year to team up with Mr. McVety’s organizations in Toronto. “I do worry something like that could happen with what we’re seeing now.”

    Gay Marriage Galvanizes Canada’s Religious Right, NYT, 19.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/world/americas/19canada.html

Afghan Attack

Brings Total of Canadians Killed

to 42

October 16, 2006
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 15 — Two Canadian soldiers in the NATO force were killed and three were wounded in an ambush in southern Afghanistan on Saturday afternoon, and an Afghan provincial council member was assassinated Sunday on his way to work, officials said.

In other violence, an Italian photojournalist was reported to have been kidnapped by gunmen in southern Afghanistan. Two policemen were killed in a raid on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, and two civilians died in a roadside bomb explosion that was apparently intended for a Westerner’s vehicle that was passing by, news agencies reported.

The Canadians were killed when their convoy came under fire by rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire in Kandahar Province, forcing their unit to call in airstrikes, according to a NATO news release. Forty-two Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year.

Muhammad Younus Hussaini, the Kandahar provincial council member, was shot dead by two men on a motorbike as he was setting off in his car for his office, said the chief of security of police, Abdul Hakim Hangar. Mr. Hussaini’s driver was wounded in the attack, he said.

Mr. Hussaini was the second local official to be killed in Kandahar city in three weeks. The head of the women’s affairs department was fatally shot as she left her home on foot for work on Sept. 25, in what the police said was part of a campaign by Taliban insurgents to intimidate the population. The police chief in Kandahar, Gen. Esmatullah Alizai, said however that it was too early to say if Mr. Hussaini had been killed by the Taliban or someone else, perhaps because of some personal enmity.

The abducted Italian photojournalist, Gabriele Torsello, and his Afghan interpreter were taken by five armed men on Saturday as they drove from Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, to the neighboring province of Kandahar, news agencies reported. The area, where British troops were battling thousands of militants through much of the summer, is prone to ambush and impromptu checkpoints by the Taliban and criminals.

The kidnapping occurred just a week after two German journalists were killed by unknown gunmen in central Afghanistan.

    Afghan Attack Brings Total of Canadians Killed to 42, NYT, 16.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/world/asia/16afghan.html

Torture Victim Had No Terror Link,

Canada Told U.S.

September 25, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — When the United States sent Maher Arar to Syria, where he was tortured for months, the deportation order stated unequivocally that Mr. Arar, a Canadian software engineer, was a member of Al Qaeda. But a few days earlier, Canadian investigators had told the F.B.I. that they had not been able to link him to the terrorist group.

That is one of the disclosures in the 1,200-page report released last week after a two-year Canadian investigation of Mr. Arar’s case found him to be innocent of any terrorist ties. The report urges the Canadian government to formally protest the American treatment of Mr. Arar, a recommendation Canadian officials are considering.

Mr. Arar, 37, who now lives in British Columbia, has a lawsuit against United States officials and agencies that is on appeal, and he has demanded an explanation for his treatment from the Bush administration.

A close reading of the Arar Commission report offers a rare window on American actions in the case, describing seemingly flimsy evidence behind the American decision in 2002 to send Mr. Arar to a country notorious for torture; a deliberate attempt by American officials to deceive Canada about where Mr. Arar was; and lingering confusion among top American officials about the two countries’ roles in the case.

President Bush earlier this month acknowledged for the first time that high-level people suspected of being terrorists had been held in secret prisons overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency. But he and other officials have said nothing publicly about the American practice of rendition, in which dozens of suspects have been seized and turned over for interrogation to other countries, including several known to engage routinely in torture.

Cases like that of Mr. Arar would not be affected by the compromise legislation on detainee treatment worked out between the White House and Republican senators last week, since it would have no effect on interrogation methods used by other countries. In fact, the proposed bill would strip non-Americans held overseas under United States control of the right to challenge their detention in federal court.

“It’s a huge hole in what Congress is doing,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which represents Mr. Arar in his lawsuit. “The government can still send people secretly to other countries where they’ll be tortured.”

For nearly four years, the United States government has refused to make public any information on the case of Mr. Arar, which has become an international symbol of American excesses in the campaign against terrorism. The Bush administration refused to cooperate with the Canadian commission, so many questions about American actions and motives remain unanswered.

But Mr. Arar’s case is more public than other cases of rendition, because he was detained inside the United States and legally deported, creating a modest paper trail. The three-volume report describes Canadian contacts with American officials in meticulous detail, offering by far the fullest account of any rendition case to date.

The commission’s report says inexperienced Canadian police officials originally passed inaccurate information to the United States linking Mr. Arar to terrorism, based largely on his acquaintance with other men under suspicion.

But in the days after Sept. 26, 2002, when Mr. Arar was detained while changing planes at Kennedy International Airport in New York City, a flurry of calls and faxes between the countries included more equivocal information.

An Oct. 4 fax to the F.B.I. from Canadian counterterrorism officials said that they “had yet to complete either a detailed investigation of Mr. Arar or a link analysis on him,” and that “while he has had contact with many individuals of interest to this project we are unable to indicate links to Al Qaeda.”

That was particularly significant because the commission concludes that all, or virtually all, of the United States’ knowledge of any threat posed by Mr. Arar came from the Canadians.

The next day, on Saturday, Oct. 5, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police official spoke by phone with an unidentified F.B.I. official. “During this conversation, the FBI official said that the Americans feared they did not have sufficient information to support charges against Mr. Arar,” the report says.

The Canadian officer said that likewise, “There was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Arar in Canada.”

Canadian officials told the Americans that if they allowed Mr. Arar to travel home to Canada, he would be kept under surveillance. But by then the Americans were already secretly working on the Syrian option, a legal possibility because Mr. Arar retained his citizenship in Syria, where he was born.

“The American authorities appear to have intentionally kept Canadian officials in the dark about their plans to remove Mr. Arar to Syria,” the report says.

Despite the uncertain report from Canada on Mr. Arar and terrorism, on Oct. 7, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official ruled that evidence “clearly and unequivocally reflects that Mr. Arar is a member of a foreign terrorist organization, to wit, Al Qaeda.” At 4 a.m. the next day, Mr. Arar was bundled aboard a Gulfstream jet that flew him to Jordan, from which he was driven to a prison in neighboring Syria.

Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, lead counsel to the Arar Commission, said he found the American actions inconsistent. “On Saturday,” Mr. Cavalluzzo said, “you have the F.B.I. saying, ‘We don’t have enough to charge him.’ On Monday, he’s a member of Al Qaeda. Well, if he’s a member of Al Qaeda, in your country he can be charged.”

Even after Mr. Arar arrived in Syria, American officials did not tell their Canadian counterparts. Only two weeks later, on Oct. 21, did Canada get confirmation, when a Syrian military intelligence officer phoned the Canadian ambassador in Damascus to say he was in custody.

Mr. Arar spent 10 months in the custody of Syrian interrogators who beat him repeatedly with a heavy metal cable and held him in a dank cell scarcely larger than a coffin, according to the commission report. In October 2003, he was released and returned to his wife and children in Canada.

But some top American officials appear to have been misinformed about the deportation decision. After Jean Chrétien, then Canadian prime minister, said publicly that the United States had decided unilaterally to send Mr. Arar to Syria, the Canadian ambassador was summoned to the National Security Council and scolded by Frances Townsend, the deputy national security adviser, who said it had been a “joint decision,” the report says.

Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, had also suggested publicly that the Canadians were complicit in the Syria deportation. But on Dec. 1, 2003, Mr. Powell called Bill Graham, the Canadian foreign minister, to say the United States had not consulted Canada about the decision.

“I was mistaken,” Mr. Powell told Mr. Graham, the report says.

The Canadian judge who led the inquiry, Dennis R. O’Connor, urged a formal protest over the American conduct. Peter MacKay, the Canadian foreign affairs minister, said Thursday it was too early to decide on a protest but added that there was an “urgent need” for talks on the issues raised by the case.

A State Department spokeswoman, Janelle Hironimus, said Friday that she knew of no plans for such talks. She said the Bush administration had declined to cooperate with the Arar Commission because its “mandate was to investigate and report on the actions of Canadian officials, and Canadian authorities were therefore the most appropriate entities to respond.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, Tasia Scolinos, said that she could not respond in detail to the commission’s findings but that the United States government “removed Mr. Arar in full compliance with the law and all applicable international treaties and conventions.” She also said the government “sought assurances with respect to Mr. Arar’s treatment” in Syria.

Mr. Cavalluzzo, the commission counsel, noted that the report held Canadian officials accountable for many lapses. But in an interview on Friday from Toronto, he said he remained “troubled” by American actions, chiefly the decision to turn Mr. Arar over to a government whose promises not to torture him had no credibility.

“Even at this time, when terrorism is a real danger,” he said, “this case points out how important it is to preserve the democratic rights we have cherished for centuries.”

    Torture Victim Had No Terror Link, Canada Told U.S., NYT, 25.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/world/americas/25arar.html

 

Ingrid Rice (Irice)

British Columbia        Canada        21.9.2006

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/rice.asp

Afghan Suicide Bombs Kill 18,

Including 4 Canadian Soldiers

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 18 — Afghanistan was hit by three devastating suicide bomb attacks on Monday, killing 18 people and wounding more than 60, many of them children, in one of the country’s worst days of violence against civilians.

Four Canadian soldiers were killed in one explosion, when a suicide bomber on a bicycle set off a bomb as the soldiers were handing out gifts to children in a village in southern Afghanistan.

Eleven other soldiers were wounded as well as 27 villagers, many of them children, local government officials said.

The bombing was in the southern village of Char Kota, in Pashmul, one of the areas that NATO troops had only just wrested from the control of Taliban fighters after two weeks of heavy fighting.

The NATO commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Richards, declared victory in the area on Sunday, saying that NATO had taken control of the area and had forced out the remaining Taliban fighters.

NATO confirmed that four soldiers from its International Security Assistance Force had been killed and several wounded but did not confirm their nationality.

NATO said the four were on patrol in a village and talking to children when the bomber approached on his bicycle.

“This action was as much an attack on the Afghan people as an attack on’’ the military force, General Richards said in a statement issued in Kabul.

“This patrol was arranging the requirement for aid, reconstruction and development in the Zhare and Panjwai areas,” his statement said. “It is beyond comprehension that a suicide bomber should choose this time to attack, knowing that he could kill innocent children.” Another suicide bomber struck in the western town of Herat, killing 11 people and wounding 18, and a third blew up his car in Kabul, killing three policemen and wounding nine other people.

A Taliban spokesman, reached by telephone, claimed responsibility for the attack in southern Afghanistan, identifying the bomber as a man from the southern city of Kandahar.

The attacks came a day after President Hamid Karzai left to attend the United Nations General Assembly and then to make state visits to Canada and Washington.

Mr. Karzai is hoping to win more support for his beleaguered country as violence worsens, and in particular to ask President Bush to bring more pressure to bear on neighboring Pakistan to help prevent the violence.

The Afghan government says Pakistan is providing refuge to the Taliban insurgents across the border.

The attack in Herat came at 7 p.m., as townspeople were leaving the main town mosque after evening prayers, according to the provincial governor’s office. It said most of those killed had been young men and the wounded had included a 4-year-old boy.

While the first spokesman said he could not confirm that it was a suicide bombing, another city official said it was the work of a suicide bomber on a bicycle, The Associated Press reported.

In Kabul, a suicide bomber blew up his car as the police approached a suspicious-looking vehicle on the main road leading east out of the city, said an Interior Ministry spokesman, Zemarai Bashari.

Three policemen were killed and one was wounded, said Ali Shah Paktiawal, director of the crime unit for the Kabul police. Eight civilian passers-by were wounded and a civilian truck was damaged.

The three bombings in one day were a clear escalation in insurgent tactics, possibly linked to Mr. Karzai’s visit to the United States and to NATO claims of success on the battlefield.

    Afghan Suicide Bombs Kill 18, Including 4 Canadian Soldiers, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19afghan.html

Canadians Fault U.S.

for Its Role in Torture Case

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

The report’s findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

The report’s criticisms and recommendations are aimed primarily at Canada’s own government and activities, rather than the United States government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry.

But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition — the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation — draw new attention to the Bush administration’s handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”

A spokesman for the United States Justice Department, Charles Miller, and a White House spokesman traveling with President Bush in New York said officials had not seen the report and could not comment.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada planned to act on the report but offered no details. “Probably in the few weeks to come we’ll be able to give you more details on that,’’ he told reporters.

The Syrian-born Mr. Arar was seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia. On Oct. 8, he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada.

Mr. Arar’s case attracted considerable attention in Canada, where critics viewed it as an example of the excesses of the campaign against terror that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. The practice of rendition has caused an outcry from human rights organizations as “outsourcing torture,” because suspects often have been taken to countries where brutal treatment of prisoners is routine.

The commission supports that view, describing a Mounted Police force that was ill-prepared to assume the intelligence duties assigned to it after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Arar, speaking at a news conference, praised the findings. “Today Justice O’Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation,” he said. “I call on the government of Canada to accept the findings of this report and hold these people responsible.”

His lawyer, Marlys Edwardh, said the report affirmed that Mr. Arar, who has been unemployed since his return to Canada, was deported and tortured because of “a breathtakingly incompetent investigation.”

The commission found that Mr. Arar first came to police attention on Oct. 12, 2001, when he met with Abdullah Almalki, a man already under surveillance by a newly established Mounted Police intelligence unit known as Project A-O Canada. Mr. Arar has said in interviews that the meeting at Mango’s Cafe in Ottawa, and a subsequent 20-minute conversation outside the restaurant, was mostly about finding inexpensive ink jet printer cartridges.

The meeting set off a chain of actions by the police. Investigators obtained a copy of Mr. Arar’s rental lease. After finding Mr. Almalki listed as an emergency contact, they stepped up their investigation of Mr. Arar. At the end of that month, the police asked customs officials to include Mr. Arar and his wife on a “terrorist lookout” list, which would subject them to more intensive question when re-entering Canada.

However, the commission found that the designation should have only been applied to people who are members or associates of terrorist networks. Neither the police nor customs had any such evidence of that concerning Mr. Arar or his wife, an economist.

From there, the Mounted Police asked that the couple be included in a database that alerts United States border officers to suspect individuals. The police described Mr. Arar and his wife as, the report said, “Islamic extremists suspected of being linked to the al Qaeda movement.”

The commission said that all who testified before it accepted that the description was false.

According to the inquiry’s finding, the Mounted Police gave the F.B.I. and other American authorities material from Project A-O Canada, which included suggestions that Mr. Arar had visited Washington around Sept. 11 and had refused to cooperate with the Canadian police. The handover of the data violated the force’s own guidelines, but was justified on the basis that such rules no longer applied after 2001.

In July 2002, the Mounted Police learned that Mr. Arar and his family were in Tunisia, and incorrectly concluded that they had left Canada permanently.

On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.

The Canadian police “had no idea of what would eventually transpire,’’ the commission said. “It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria.”

While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar’s requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.

Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed — quite correctly — that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”

Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

Mr. Arar said he appealed a recent decision by a federal judge in New York dismissing the suit he brought against the United States. The report recommends that the Canadian government, which is also being sued by Mr. Arar, offer him compensation and possibly a job.

Mr. Arar recently moved to Kamloops, British Columbia, where his wife found a teaching position.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

    Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/americas/19canada.html

Woman Killed by Gunman in Montreal;

19 Are Injured

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN AUSTEN

MONTREAL, Sept. 13 — A man wearing a long black coat and carrying a semiautomatic rifle shot and killed a woman and wounded 19 other people, at least five critically, at the downtown campus of a junior college on Wednesday. The man himself died after exchanging shots with the police.

The shooting Wednesday at Dawson College brought chaos and fear to the core of Canada’s second largest city as major thoroughfares were closed, office towers were evacuated and subway service was disrupted. It also evoked bitter memories of a shooting in 1989 at another downtown college where 14 women died before the gunman killed himself.

In the Dawson case, the police said an autopsy would determine whether the assailant was killed by the police or by his own weapon.

The Montreal police said it received the first call about the shooting at 12:41 p.m. Several witnesses reported seeing the man start shooting students near an entrance without a word or provocation.

As the police arrived, witnesses said, he entered the building, continuing to fire randomly as he made his way toward a crowded cafeteria. Video recorded with a camera phone showed the gunman exchanging fire with the police inside the college.

Dawson has an enrollment of about 10,000 students, most of them teenagers. About half were believed to have been on campus at the time.

Despite the early arrival of the police, the college and the neighborhood — an affluent, largely English-speaking district — fell into confusion with herds of people fleeing along streets and pouring out of a nearby shopping mall. Like much of downtown Montreal, the college is connected to a network of underground walkways that also feeds into the subway system. In what appeared to be a bid to prevent the escape of the gunman, a major subway line was closed temporarily.

Simon Davies, who teaches film studies at the college, said he had heard a student shouting about the shooting in a hallway and then saw him run past with a bloodied face.

“I went out to the hallway, I went around the corner and saw a policeman run by with his gun drawn and heard more gunshots,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is foolish, I shouldn’t be here.’ ” A panic grew among students in the screening room for two film classes as an overloaded cellphone network made calling impossible.

Another film studies teacher, Dipti Gupta, said her students had carried a badly wounded woman in from the hallway and rested her on a desk.

Adding to the panic were rumors, later disproved, that more than one gunman was stalking the campus.

The woman died in a hospital during the early evening. Officials did not identify her, but the head of Montreal’s police force, Yvan Delorme, told the French news service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that she had been in her 20’s.

The Sûreté de Québec, the provincial police force, which investigates all killings involving municipal officers, did not disclose the gunman’s name. But it said he was 25, born in Quebec and a Montreal-area resident. Mr. Delorme said the motive for the shooting spree was a mystery, adding, “There is no racist connotation or no terrorist link as far as we know.”

The 1989 killings at the Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school, were by a man who blamed women for his financial and career problems. The shock that followed those killings prompted a national new gun registry law that was unpopular in rural areas. The Conservative government that came to power in January is winding down that registry in favor of longer mandatory sentences for gun-related crimes.

Christopher Mason contributed reporting from Toronto.

    Woman Killed by Gunman in Montreal; 19 Are Injured, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/world/americas/14canada.html

Several people shot

at Montreal college

Updated 9/13/2006 3:16 PM ET
AP
USA Today

MONTREAL (AP) — At least one gunman in a black trench coat opened fire Wednesday in the cafeteria of a Montreal college and wounded an unknown number of people before shooting himself, witnesses and police said.

Scores of students at Dawson College near downtown fled into the surrounding streets after the shooting broke out in the school of about 10,000. Some of them had bloody clothes.

CBC-TV showed police with guns drawn standing behind a police cruiser.

Martine Millette of the Montreal police said authorities did not know how many people had been shot. There also was uncertainty if there was more than one gunman.

Millette said the man later shot himself. Constable Philippe Gouin said "in all probability, the suspect has committed suicide."

Student Devansh Smri Vastava said he saw a man in military fatigues with "a big rifle" storm the school's cafeteria.

"He just started shooting at people," Vastava said, adding that he heard about 20 shots fired. He also said teachers ran through the halls telling students to get out.

Other witnesses spoke of a gunman wearing a black trench coat.

"We all ran upstairs. There were cops firing. It was so crazy," Vastava said. "I was terrified. The guy was shooting at people randomly. He didn't care he was just shooting at everybody. I just got out."

Derick Osei, 19, said he walking down the stairs when he saw a man with a gun.

"He ... just started shooting up the place. I ran up to the third floor and I looked down and he was still shooting," Osei said. "He was hiding behind the vending machines and he came out with a gun and started pointing and pointed at me. So I ran up the stairs. I saw a girl get shot in the leg."

Osei said people in the cafeteria were all lying on the floor.

Another student who gave her name as Chloe tearfully recounted seeing the gunman pointing a weapon at people.

"All of a sudden I turned around and saw a man who was all dressed in black," she told radio station 940 News.

"This dude with the clothes started pointing the gun at other people. He was right behind me. He turned around and went in the corner of the cafeteria," she said.

Another student told 940 News that she had seen two people who had been shot, including one who was hit in the neck. The student said a friend told her four people had been shot.

Ingrid Keigan, a 17-year-old student, said she saw one person outside the school who had been shot in the chest.

A SWAT team and canine units were at the 12-acre campus, going floor by floor to look for victims, Sgt. Giuseppe Boccardi told CNN.

"Most of the students have exited the college grounds," he said.

People have also been evacuated from the nearby Alexis-Nihon shopping center.

Canada's worst mass shooting also happened in Montreal. Gunman Marc Lepin killed 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnic on Dec. 6, 1989.

That shooting spurred efforts for tighter gun laws and greater awareness of societal violence — particularly domestic abuse. Canada's tighter gun law was achieved mainly as the results of efforts by survivors and relatives of the victims.

Another shooting in Montreal occurred in 1992, when a Concordia University professor killed four colleagues.

Dawson College was the first English-language institution in Quebec's network of university preparatory colleges when it was founded in 1969. It is the largest college of general and vocational education, known by its French acronym CEGEP, in the province.

    Several people shot at Montreal college, UT, 13.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-09-13-montreal-shooting_x.htm

7 Years Into Self-Rule,

Inuit Are Struggling

June 18, 2006
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

IQALUIT, Nunavut — The Inuit of the Canadian Arctic have forsaken their sod houses and dog sleds for satellite television and snowmobiles in less than two generations. Assembling a smoothly functioning government and a solid educational system has been another matter entirely.

The initiative to grant Nunavut, a land of frozen fjords, desolate tundra and roaming herds of caribou, self-rule seven years ago was heralded worldwide as an enlightened attempt to right past wrongs against a suffering aboriginal people.

But two recent federal government reports tell a disheartening story of frustrated hopes and local failures that do not bode well for Nunavut's exceptionally young population (38 percent of its people are under 14), one still plagued by widespread drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide and family abuse.

One report found that only 25 percent of Inuit students graduate from high school. The lack of basic skills means that the territorial government has filled only 45 percent of its 3,200 public positions with Inuit, once known as Eskimos, although Inuit are 85 percent of the population. Meanwhile, unemployment for the territory is at 30 percent, with some communities suffering 70 percent unemployment.

"Nunavut faces a moment of change, a moment of crisis," wrote Thomas R. Berger, a former British Columbia Supreme Court judge, in his report to the federal minister of Indian affairs and northern development. Noting that 75 percent of Nunavut's 30,000 people speak Inuktitut as their first language while the principal language of the government remains English, Judge Berger added, "the people of the new territory speak a language which is an impediment to obtaining employment in their own public service."

A second report, by Sheila Fraser, the auditor general of Canada, disclosed widespread public financial mismanagement that was responsible for errors, bad decisions, waste and fraud in the spending of nearly $1 billion in annual federal and other financing.

She noted that the territorial government's efforts to decentralize operations to spread public jobs beyond the capital, Iqaluit, had spread accounting talent too thinly. She recommended "recentralizing" government accounting operations so senior staff members could more closely supervise less experienced public workers.

"Probably we need more time," said Levi Barnabas, a member of the Nunavut Legislative Assembly, acknowledging in an interview the central conclusions of the two reports. "Education in southern Canada is 200 years old, and our education system is only 60 years old."

Few sociologists are surprised by the lack of significant improvement since the establishment of the territory despite the highest per capita federal aid budget for any jurisdiction in the country.

The Inuit are a traditionally nomadic people who migrated about 1,000 years ago from western Alaska toward what is today Arctic Canada. Until very recently, they had no formal political organization. Nuclear families lived together and occasionally joined other families to compose small, fluid bands to share their hunt.

Since World War II, the Inuit have been forced by the federal government to abandon their nomadic lives for remote settlements approachable only by airplane. The federal police killed their sled dogs, saying they were sickly. Young Inuit were required to leave their parents and sent to residential schools, where they were routinely abused physically and sexually.

Modern life has its benefits, but the Inuit diet of hunted game has largely been replaced by sugary and fatty packaged foods. Welfare has become a way of life, and 30-year-old grandparents are not uncommon. Housing is scarce, so crowding only exacerbates social ills.

The new Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has earmarked nearly $200 million for new housing in the territory in its budget, but that fell short of what the previous Liberal government had promised.

Judge Berger recommended in his report that a good way to start fixing Nunavut would be to restructure its bilingual educational system in which children are taught in Inuktitut through fourth or fifth grade and then introduced to English as the sole language of instruction.

"This reintroduces the colonial message of inferiority," he wrote. "The Inuit student mentally withdraws." He recommended that both languages be used through elementary and secondary schools.

Territorial and federal officials say they are studying the recommendation.

Daniel Iqaluk, 22, whose main employment is washing dishes in the hamlet of Resolute, said he quit school after 11th grade because his classes were boring and confusing. He said his problems started early: while his parents spoke to him at home in English, his classes in early elementary school were in Inuktitut.

"I couldn't understand what they were talking about so all I did was watch and I never learned," he added while taking a break from cleaning an oil slick from a leaky snowmobile.

He said he did not think the establishment of self-government for the territory made a difference, "but I don't know why."

Many others here say they do like self-rule, and think it will bear fruit with time.

"Job-wise we're not better off," said Mayor Susan Salluviniq of Resolute, who was unraveling a ball of yarn for a worker who knits on the floor of an office equipped with high-speed Internet, maps and a fax machine. "But it's slowly coming along."

    7 Years Into Self-Rule, Inuit Are Struggling, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/world/americas/18canada.html

6 Arrested in Canada Raid

Attended the Same Mosque

June 5, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario, June 4 — At least 6 of the 17 people arrested by Canadian authorities in a sweeping counterterrorism operation over the weekend regularly attended the same storefront mosque in this middle-class Toronto suburb of modest brick rental townhouses and well-kept lawns, fellow worshipers said Sunday.

Their attendance at the mosque, Al-Rahman Islamic Centre for Islamic Education, is one of the few public pieces of information that clearly link any of the suspects — 12 adults and 5 youths — in one of the biggest antiterrorism arrests in North America since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Members at a mosque prayer meeting on Sunday said the six fellow worshipers who were arrested included the eldest, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, described by several acquaintances as a school bus driver and an active member of the mosque who frequently led prayers, made fiery speeches and influenced young people who attended the services.

"He spent a lot of time with youth," said Faheem Bukhari, a director of the Mississauga Muslim Community Center who sometimes attended prayers at the mosque. "He'd take them for soccer or bowling, and talk to them."

Mr. Bukhari said Mr. Jamal never openly embraced violence or talked about Al Qaeda, but was "very vocal and I believe could incite these young kids for jihad."

Anser Farooq, the lawyer representing Mr. Jamal and three other people from the Islamic center, said Mr. Jamal was not a leader of that mosque. "He's one of about a half-dozen people who lead prayers at the mosque," he said. Mr. Jamal was not part of any conspiracy, Mr. Farooq said.

As the authorities in Canada and the United States continued to piece together details from the lengthy investigation, a mosque in Toronto was vandalized overnight. More than a dozen windows in the building were broken, two panels of the glass front door were smashed and several cars parked in the rear of the building were damaged. Islamic leaders who met with the Toronto police chief on Sunday demanded a thorough investigation of the vandalism. They also urged calm and expressed hope that the 17 people arrested Friday night would receive a fair hearing.

The joint counterterrorism action by hundreds of agents of the local police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has led to little public disclosure about the underground workings of suspected domestic terrorist cells that authorities say were determined to use homemade bombs against targets in southern Ontario. But the lack of detail has started to raise questions about the credibility of the charges and the actions of the police.

While many Canadians expressed relief upon hearing the news that a potentially devastating attack had been averted, some in the Muslim community were skeptical about the lack of specific charges. The 12 adults were charged with offenses under the Criminal Code of Canada. Authorities did not identify the potential targets.

Since Sept. 11, several police investigations against Muslims here have unraveled after arrests were made, which has left a bitter legacy within the Muslim community.

"People are suspicious and there's anger," said Aly Hindy, imam at the Salaheddin Islamic Center in Scarborough, an eastern suburb of Toronto with a sizable Muslim community. "We are being targeted not because of what we've done, but because of who we are and what we believe in."

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Saturday that the group of men "took steps to acquire" three tons of ammonium nitrate and bomb-making electronic components. But they left unclear whether the men had actually taken delivery of the material and had it in their possession when arrested, leading some here to question police tactics.

Mr. Hindy expressed puzzlement over how and where the suspects could have hidden three tons of fertilizer. "These guys are living in townhouses and apartments, in the city," he said. "Maybe the police tried to frame them, I don't know. "

Canadian authorities have refused to provide any details of the suspected plot, but they have said they believe that the group represented "a real and serious threat." The extent to which undercover agents had a role in the arrests is unclear.

The Globe and Mail newspaper reported Sunday on its Web site that the supposed conspiracy dated to March 2005 and that men and youths in the group might have undergone training at sites in Fort Erie, Ont., near the United States border, and in Barrie, north of Toronto.

American officials in Washington and New York said they had been aware of the investigation and were informed of the coordinated law enforcement action. American counterterrorism officials said some of the Canadians arrested might have had limited contact with two men from Georgia arrested earlier this year and charged with supporting terrorism or providing false information.

The 12 adults arrested range in age from 19 to 43. Most live in Toronto or in this suburb of more than 700,000 people just to the northwest of the city. Two who reside in Kingston, about 160 miles east of Toronto, did not appear in court because they have been serving time in a Kingston prison on weapons possession charges, the Toronto Star reported.

Some Islamic community leaders in the Toronto area have raised concerns that the younger men may have been led to participate in a suspected plot by older, more radical Muslims, like Mr. Jamal.

"I do not think of him as an imam," said Tareeq Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress. "People like him are freelancers. I don't fear imams. I fear freelancers who are creating a Islamacist, supremacist cult."

The Islamic center that Mr. Jamal frequented was quiet Sunday. A class of Koran studies scheduled for midday was canceled. Situated in a small strip mall between the Hasty Market convenience store and the Café de Kahn, a Pakistani and Indian restaurant, the mosque is one of several Islamic centers that have sprung up in Mississauga in recent years. Neighbors said it had grown popular since it was founded about a decade ago. One said that on Friday nights the entrance was clogged with so many shoes that it was hard to walk on the sidewalk.

After midday prayer on Sunday, a group of about 10 men came out of the center and spoke to reporters gathered there. "There's no recruitment happening here," said one man, who gave his name as Sam Lel. He said the men from the mosque who were arrested were professionals and were not involved in terrorism. "This is a completely wrong allegation," he said.

At Mr. Jamal's home, a one-story rental unit in a large townhouse development nearby, a man who came to the door refused to answer questions. "Oh no, sorry," he said. A decal on the front door read "In the name of Allah we enter and in the name of Allah we leave and upon our Lord we place our trust."

Mr. Jamal, with short black hair and a short beard, was described by neighbors as a taciturn man who, in the four years or so he had lived in the townhouse, rarely spoke to anyone. "I have no complaints about him directly, but I can tell you he never fit in," said Jerry Tavares, who lives a few doors down. "But the thing that concerns me most is that he drives one of the school buses that take our kids to school." Heavily armed police raided the house on Friday night and took Mr. Jamal into custody. Neighbors said they saw the police removing computer equipment.

In other neighborhoods of Mississauga and the greater Toronto area, neighbors described the men who were arrested as serious professionals or confused youths who were not very likely to have been involved in a conspiracy. In a middle-class section of Toronto's east end, neighbors described another suspect, Steven Vikash Chand, 25, as a quiet man who, with several other Muslim men, kept odd hours.

"They sleep during the day and their activity is at night," said Jack Lovell, 56, who lives two doors down. "Absolutely no trouble whatsoever."

The arrests that shocked Canadians when they were announced Saturday morning did not appear to create much lingering fear. Roads near the Islamic center in Mississauga were closed Sunday morning for a road race. Downtown Toronto was shut down by a charity bicycle ride.

"Everybody is going about their normal business, which is the best way to combat terrorism," said Mayor David Miller. During the months-long investigation, the city added some security precautions, Mr. Miller said. But it has not beefed up security since the arrests.

In Muslim neighborhoods, news that the International Muslims Organization of Toronto, a mosque in the industrial neighborhood of Etobicoke, had been vandalized set off fears of a backlash. Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair met with Muslim community leaders, who expressed fears that the vandalism was linked to anti-Muslim resentment set off by the arrests.

Ian Austen, Chris Mason and David Staba contributed reporting for this article.

    6 Arrested in Canada Raid Attended the Same Mosque, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/world/americas/05canada.html

Canadian Border

Proves Difficult to Secure

June 5, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

Tighter border controls between the United States and Canada are likely to be less useful than better domestic intelligence and information-sharing in detecting homegrown terrorist plots in North America, terrorism experts said yesterday.

According to Canadian authorities, the suspected fertilizer bomb plot that led to the arrest Saturday in Ontario of 17 men, most of them Canadian citizens of South Asian origin, appeared to follow the pattern of successful terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and in London last year. As in those instances, officials said, those accused in the Canadian case are Muslims with no evident ties to Al Qaeda leaders overseas except a shared ideology.

"These are the metastases of the cancer of international Islamic extremism," said John O. Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former career Central Intelligence Agency officer. "It shows the terrorist threat may be within our midst and not coming from off our shores."

Mr. Brennan said that while improved border technology and a planned requirement that Canadian visitors carry passports might help, there was no chance of stopping all potential terrorists from crossing a 4,000-mile border that includes huge swaths of forest and the Great Lakes.

"You don't want to paralyze the cross-border traffic and trade that's so important to both countries," Mr. Brennan said in an interview. Rather, he said, the lesson for the United States is the value of careful, patient intelligence collection to detect possible threats.

Speaking in similar terms yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised what she called Canada's "very great success in their counterterrorism efforts."

"We have excellent counterterrorism cooperation with Canada and we're very glad to see this operation being a success," Ms. Rice said on the CNN program "Late Edition." "We don't know of any indication that there is a U.S. part to this, but by all means, we have the best possible cooperation."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Saturday that there were contacts between two of the suspects arrested in Canada and two men living in Georgia who were recently arrested, Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19. But the bureau reiterated in a statement yesterday that "there is no current outstanding threat to any targets on U.S. soil emanating from this case."

Richard Kolko, an F.B.I. spokesman, said the bureau and its Canadian counterpart had "worked closely on this investigation" as they had on previous counterterrorism matters. He declined to give details.

The Canadian arrests were made in the midst of an intense political debate over illegal immigration into the United States from Mexico. The news focused new attention on the Canadian border, which is twice as long and much less patrolled than the Mexican border. Proponents of tighter immigration controls asserted that the Canadian arrests underscored the threat they said lurked just beyond American borders.

Michael W. Cutler, a former veteran immigration agent now at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said relatively liberal political asylum rules in Canada for immigrants, combined with the relatively open border, were "a nightmare for the U.S."

But Mr. Cutler acknowledged the impossibility of sealing the border with Canada and said better enforcement of immigration laws inside the United States might be more important than tighter entrance controls. "The bottom line is we can't just focus on the border," he said.

Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States, yesterday denied that his country had weak asylum rules or was home to large numbers of Al Qaeda sympathizers.

"I think that our immigration laws as they are implemented are very close in the outcomes as the United States immigration laws," Mr. Wilson said on "Late Edition." "We take very seriously these issues of terrorism, as demonstrated by this very successful exercise that was completed on Friday night, Saturday morning."

As part of the intelligence reorganization of 2004, Congress required that starting in 2008 Canadians must show a passport or a similarly secure document to enter the United States. But under legislation recently passed by the Senate and pending in the House, the requirement would be postponed until at least June 2009.

Senator Norm Coleman, Republican from Minnesota and the main proponent of delaying the passport requirement, said in a statement yesterday that it in no way reflected a lack of "vigilance against terrorism." Instead, Mr. Coleman said, his amendment was intended to make sure new border-crossing procedures are tested to see if they can work without "strangling the economies of our border communities."

The arrest in December 1999 of Ahmed Ressam as he tried to carry explosives from Canada into Washington State helped unravel the so-called Millennium terrorist plot, and Canadian authorities have kept suspected radicals in the large South Asian populations in big Canadian cities under surveillance.

But Stephen E. Flynn, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said any notion that Canada posed a security threat "needs a sanity check."

Mr. Flynn said that from local law enforcement to national intelligence agencies, the two countries cooperated intensely on counterterrorism.

Mr. Flynn and Mr. Brennan said the arrests in Canada demonstrated the need for better domestic intelligence against terrorist threats, a touchy area in which aggressive efforts by the Bush administration have already prompted an outcry from civil libertarians.

    Canadian Border Proves Difficult to Secure, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/world/americas/05border.html

In Bomb Plot News Coverage,

a Toronto Newspaper Shines

June 5, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN AUSTEN

TORONTO, June 4 — The competition between Toronto's four major daily newspapers is often intense, particularly over crime news. But its results are rarely as one-sided as the coverage that followed the arrests of 17 Ontario residents in what the police call a terrorist bomb plot.

Some readers of The Globe and Mail awoke Saturday to find nothing about the raids while, at the other extreme, The Toronto Star published 3,000 words and several photos spread over three pages.

The embarrassment of the other newspapers by The Star, which has emphasized crime coverage for much of its history, actually began while the raids were just getting under way on Friday night. Minutes after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued a cryptic press release at 9:16 p.m. about a news conference set for the following morning, The Star's Web site produced a story breaking the news of the police sweep.

Nor did The Star, Canada's largest newspaper by circulation, make any attempt at modesty. Underneath a main headline in type several inches high, another headline boasted that "The Star takes you inside the spy game that led to last night's dramatic arrests."

The Star's success, which also included the reporting of several details, like potential bomb targets, that continued to elude other news organizations, did not attract much in the way of congratulations from rivals.

That includes The National Post, which hastily reworked a scheduled story about terrorists to include a basic outline of the raids. When asked how The Star managed to so outflank its competition, Stephen Meurice, the managing editor for news, replied, "I can't possibly tell you."

The answer, said Giles Gherson, The Star's editor in chief, was mainly hard work by a single reporter.

About two years ago, before Mr. Gherson joined the paper, The Star's editors assigned Michelle Shephard, a police reporter, to cover national security issues.

Mr. Gherson acknowledged there were times when the decision to commit a reporter to that beat full time did not always seem wise. "There have been a number of cases she has covered that didn't amount to anything at all," he said.

The timing of The Star's scoop was particularly unfortunate for The Post and The Globe, which managed to squeeze a small story onto Page 2 in just over half of its copies on Saturday. A vestige of provincial laws that once banned sales on Sunday, most Canadian newspapers still produce their major weekend editions on Saturday. And The Post and The Globe do not publish paper editions on Sunday (although The Globe did add details to the story online).

The Star took advantage of the 24-hour lag to add another 11,000 words of reporting over nine pages on Sunday.

The Toronto Sun, a tabloid which does publish on Sunday, did better than The Globe. It ran a story of just under 700 words.

But its efforts were not entirely successful. The only information about bomb targets officials offered on Saturday was to refute The Sun's claim that Toronto's subway network was on the list.

    In Bomb Plot News Coverage, a Toronto Newspaper Shines, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/world/americas/05star.html

17 Held in Plot to Bomb Sites in Ontario

June 4, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN AUSTEN and DAVID JOHNSTON

OTTAWA, June 3 — Seventeen Canadian residents were arrested and charged with plotting to attack targets in southern Ontario with crude but powerful fertilizer bombs, the Canadian authorities said Saturday.

The arrests represented one of the largest counterterrorism sweeps in North America since the attacks of September 2001. American officials said that the plot did not involve any targets in the United States, but added that the full dimension of the plan for attacks was unknown.

At a news conference in Toronto, home to at least six suspects, police and intelligence officials said they had been monitoring the group for some time and moved in to make the arrests on Friday after the group arranged to take delivery of three tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be made into an explosive when combined with fuel oil.

"It was their intent to use it for a terrorist attack," said Mike McDonell, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police assistant commissioner. He said that by comparison the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people was carried out "with only one ton of ammonium nitrate."

The 17 men were mainly of South Asian descent and most were in their teens or early 20's. One of the men was 30 years old and the oldest was 43 years old, police officials said. None of them had any known affiliation with Al Qaeda.

"They represent the broad strata of our society," Mr. McDonell said. "Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed."

The Canadian police declined to identify specific targets, though they did dismiss reports in the news media that Toronto's subway system was on the list. The Toronto Star, citing an unidentified source, said the group had a list that included the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa as well as the Toronto branch office of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. At the news conference, officials emphasized that the targets were all in Canada.

In the United States, the arrests reignited fears among American counterterrorism officials about the porous northern border even as the Bush administration and lawmakers have focused attention in recent weeks about hardening the southern border in an effort to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants. Since the arrest of Ahmed Ressam in December 1999 as he tried to smuggle explosive chemicals into Washington State in a plot to strike targets that included the Los Angeles international airport, authorities have expressed fears that extremists could use Canada as a platform to make attacks inside the United States.

The arrests came at the end of a week of furious debate over federal spending for domestic security, with officials in cities like New York and Washington bitterly criticizing Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, for not allocating more money to cities thought likely to remain high on the terrorist target list for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups.

The men accused in Canada operated what the police called training camps for its members. At their news conference, the police displayed at least one pistol, electronics components, military fatigues, army-style boots and two-way radios they said were used at the camps, although they would not disclose their locations.

The Toronto Star reported that in 2004 the intelligence agency began monitoring Internet exchanges, some of which were encrypted. According to the newspaper, the training in camps took place north of Toronto. Members of the group, according to that account, often visited a popular Canadian chain of doughnut shops to wash up following their training sessions.

Counterterrorism officials said that interviews with suspects would provide greater clarity about the nature of the plot, but they said that the men had taken a significant step, moving beyond the planning stage, toward acquiring a large quantity of potentially explosive fertilizer.

It was not clear whether the group ever had possession of the chemicals, or whether authorities may have had a role in arranging for the shipment or transporting the material.

A police spokeswoman, Cpl. Michele Paradis, asked whether the group had actually had the three tons of chemicals in their possession, and if the police had "seized" it, replied: "That's difficult to answer. They made arrangements to have it delivered and they took delivery."

American officials said that White House officials and counterterrorism agencies had been briefed on the case, and of the coming arrests, in recent days.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said, "We are coordinating very closely with our Canadian counterparts." He said Mr. Chertoff spoke early Saturday with Stockwell Day, the Canadian minister of public safety, but added, "We have not made any adjustment to our security posture along the northern border."

The New York City Police Department, which has had a detective assigned as an intelligence liaison with the Toronto police for four years, said it was being kept informed, but had not altered its own security measures.

Even as American officials portrayed the case as mainly a Canadian operation, the arrests so close to the United States border jangled the nerves of intelligence officials who have been warning of the continuing danger posed by small "homegrown" extremist groups, who appeared to operate without any direct control by known leaders of Al Qaeda.

One senior counterterrorism official said there had been extensive contact between American and Canadian authorities in the past several days. Though there appeared to have been no direct threat inside the United States, the proximity of the potential terrorists to the American border "really got everybody's attention," the official said.

American officials were granted anonymity because they were speaking about a continuing investigation.

The F.B.I. issued a statement on Saturday saying there was a "preliminary indication" that some of the Canadian subjects might have had "limited contact" with two people from Georgia who were recently arrested. Those two were Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, an American of Bangladeshi descent, and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a Pakistani-born American.

Law-enforcement officials said the men arrested in Georgia had made "casing" videos of various sites in Washington, D.C., and have said that their case was linked to the arrests of several men in Britain last fall, and that the two were believed to have met with "like-minded Islamic extremists " in Canada in March 2005.

A counterterrorism official in the United States said that while there was contact between the Georgia men earlier this year and those arrested in Canada on Friday, there was no evidence that the Georgia suspects were involved in the bombing plot.

The suspects were arrested in a series of raids that began late on Friday night and continued until early on Saturday morning, in Toronto, Mississauga and Kingston, a college town southwest of Ottawa.

All of the men under arrest were taken to a heavily fortified police station in Pickering, Ontario, a city east of Toronto. Five were under the age of 18 and not identified by the authorities. The others were identified as Fahim Ahmad, 21; Zakaria Amara, 20; Asad Ansari, 21; Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30; Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43; Mohammed Dirie, 22; Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24; Jahmaal James, 23; Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19; Steven Vikash Chand, alias Abdul Shakur, 25; Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21; and Saad Khalid, 19.

Alvin Chand, the brother of suspect Steven Vikash Chand, dismissed the police allegations outside the courthouse.

"He's not a terrorist, come on, he's a Canadian citizen" Mr. Chand said, The Canadian Press reported. "The people that were arrested are good people. They go to the mosque. They go to school, go to college."

Anser Farooq, a lawyer from Mississauga who is representing five of the defendants, said a lack of information at Saturday's court hearing made it difficult to assess the case brought by the police.

In court, he said, government lawyers broke with tradition and did not present a synopsis of the reasons for their charges, arguing that they had not had time to prepare it. It will, however, be presented at another hearing on Tuesday.

He declined to identify his clients because he was still formalizing his relationship with some of them. But he said none of the five have a criminal record.

Tarek Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, a national group, said that Mr. Jamal, the oldest of the suspects, is a well-known and fiery figure in the Toronto area's South Asian community, and that he was the imam of the Ar-Rahman Quran Learning Center, a mosque in a rented industrial building in Mississauga.

Immigration from South Asia greatly expanded in Canada beginning in the 1970's, and, like several Canadian cities, Toronto and its suburbs have long had a large and prominent South Asian community. "He took over an otherwise peaceful mosque and threw out the old management," Mr. Fatah said. "There were reports throughout the community of him making hate speeches."

The mosque did not respond to phone messages. "This is the work of people who believe they are victimized when they are not," Mr. Fatah said. "Many Islamacists are preying on the Islamic community."

"Law enforcement agencies have done a great service to the Muslim community by busting this terrorist cell," he added.

Luc Portelance, the assistant director of operations at the Canadian intelligence agency, said the group's members "appear to have become adherents of a violent ideology inspired by Al Qaeda." The police official, however, said that there was no evidence of links between the two groups.

Canada has not sent troops to Iraq, and officials at the news conference said they did not believe the group was angry over Canada's deployment of troops to Afghanistan.

In a November 2002 audiotape claiming to be a message from Osama bin Laden, Bloomberg reported, Al Queda said Canada was "allying themselves with America in attacking us in Afghanistan," and listed five possible targets: Canada, the United States, Britain, Spain and Australia.

The arrests were only the second time that Canadian police have brought charges under anti-terrorism laws passed at the end of 2001. Just over two years ago, Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a software developer in Ottawa, was charged in connection with a bomb plot.

Both the police and a spokeswoman for the intelligence agency declined to say when they first became aware of the Canadian group. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mayor David Miller of Toronto said he was given a confidential briefing about the group several months ago.

All but two of the adult suspects appeared at a court north of Toronto in Brampton, Ontario, Saturday afternoon. By late morning, all entrances to the Brampton courthouse were blockaded by steel barriers and police cars. As snipers watched from nearby rooftops, people entering the court were required to remove their shoes and were searched at a series of three command checkpoints.

At the news conference, Mr. McDonell said, the authorities were successful in shutting down the terrorist group.

"These individuals were allegedly intent on committing acts of terrorism against their own country and their own people," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. "Today, Canada's security and intelligence measures worked."

Ian Austen reported from Ottawa for this article, and David Johnston from Washington. Chris Mason contributed reporting from Ontario and Robert Pear from Washington.

    17 Held in Plot to Bomb Sites in Ontario, NYT, 4.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/world/americas/04toronto.html?hp&ex=1149480000&en=84373be6349c6d33&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ottawa dispatch

Canadians are waking up to the cost of their frontline role in Afghanistan, writes Anne McIlroy

Tuesday April 4, 2006
Guardian

The body of Private Robert Costall, the first Canadian soldier killed in direct combat in Afghanistan, arrived at an Ontario military base at the weekend. He was 22 and the father of a one-year-old boy. His widow and his parents greeted the coffin, the grief on their faces captured by the national media.

Canadians see themselves as peacekeepers, and know the risks of sending soldiers to some of the most dangerous countries in the world. They are unaccustomed, however, to being at war, and are slowly coming to terms with the fact that more than 2,200 Canadian troops now in Kandahar are doing more than keeping the peace in southern Afghanistan.

On February 28, Canada assumed command of Nato forces in Kandahar. Nato's mission is to stabilise the region. To do that, it has to fight a war with the insurgents, who include the Taliban, bandits, drug traffickers and al-Qaida members. The attacks have grown more bold and more deadly in the past few months. Pte Costall was killed in a firefight with insurgents who attacked a forward base about 69 miles (110km) northwest of Kandahar.

Canada is in Afghanistan because its former Liberal government wanted to show the Americans that it was committed to the war on terror despite its refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq. At first, Canada played its traditional peacekeeping role. The decision to lead Nato forces in Kandahar changed that, because the region is the stronghold of the remnants of the Taliban.

The Liberals warned that the mission to southern Afghanistan would bring casualties, but many Canadians didn't pay attention until January, when the diplomat Glyn Berry was killed in a roadside bomb and three soldiers were severely injured.

Public support for the mission seemed to be faltering when the prime minister, Stephen Harper, visited the troops last month.

"You can't lead from the bleachers. I want Canada to be a leader," he told the soldiers.

"Of course, standing up for core Canadian values, taking on the dangers you're taking on, these things are not easy. It's never easy for the men and women who are on the frontlines. And there may be some who want to cut and run. But cutting and running is not your way. It's not my way. And it's not the Canadian way."

Mr Harper made it clear that there would be no parliamentary debate over the deployment, as some opposition politicians have demanded.

A poll published around the time of Mr Harper's visit found that the deployment had the support of 55%of those surveyed nationwide. But many Canadians appear uncomfortable with the idea of soldiers being engaged in active combat. Almost half (47%) oppose that role.

Active combat is inevitable, however, in a mission that combines humanitarian work with battles against an insurgency that uses bombs and suicide attacks.

There are many other countries taking part in the effort to rebuild Afghanistan, and much has been accomplished since the fall of the Taliban in November 2001. The country has a new constitution, and held free and fair elections in the autumn of 2004, electing Hamid Karzai as president. Hundreds of schools have been opened, and an army and national police force have been established.

The cost has been high, however. The US, Germany, Spain, France, Romania, Denmark and Italy have all had troops killed in action.

Canada has now lost 11 soldiers and one diplomat. Another soldier was badly injured in an axe attack.

There will no doubt be more attacks. Spring means the snow on the mountain passes will melt, and more insurgents can make their way into the country from Pakistan. Mr Harper has made it clear that Canada is in Afghanistan for the long haul.

"We don't make a commitment and then run away at the first sign of trouble. We don't and we will not as long as I am running this country."

    Canadians are waking up to the cost of their frontline role in Afghanistan, writes Anne McIlroy, G, 4.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1746487,00.html

Ruling Has Canada Planting Seeds of Private Health Care

February 20, 2006
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

TORONTO, Feb. 19 — The cracks are still small in Canada's vaunted public health insurance system, but several of its largest provinces are beginning to open the way for private health care eventually to take root around the country.

Last week Quebec proposed to lift a ban on private health insurance for several elective surgical procedures, and announced that it would pay for such surgeries at private clinics when waiting times at public facilities were unreasonable.

The proposal, by Premier Jean Charest, who called for "a new era for health care in Quebec," came in response to a Supreme Court decision last June that struck down a provincial law that banned private medical insurance and ordered the province to initiate a reform program within a year.

The Supreme Court decision ruled that long waits for various medical procedures in the province had violated patients' "life and personal security, inviolability and freedom," and that prohibition of private health insurance was unconstitutional when the public health system did not deliver "reasonable services."

The decision applied directly only to Quebec, but it has generated movement for private clinics and private insurance in several provinces where governments hope to forestall similar court decisions.

Coincidentally, last week Premier Gordon Campbell of British Columbia asked in his Throne speech, the equivalent of a state of the province address, "Does it really matter to patients where or how they obtain their surgical treatment if it is paid for with public funds?"

It was a question that was almost unthinkable for a major politician to ask before last year's Supreme Court decision. Public health care insurance, where citizens go to their doctor or to the hospital for basic services paid for by taxpayers, has long been considered politically sacrosanct in Canada, and even central to the national identity.

Mr. Campbell presented his vision for a new provincial health care system that would resemble those of most of Western Europe, where the government pays for essential treatment delivered in both public and private clinics and hospitals.

Alberta's premier, Ralph Klein, recently expressed a similar goal, and his government is promising legislation to permit doctors to work simultaneously in private and public institutions and allow the building of private hospitals.

Quebec, Canada's second most populous province, after Ontario, has not decided to go that far. Forced by the court to meet a one-year deadline for a plan to change the system, Mr. Charest proposed limited but important changes.

He proposed that private insurance cover knee and hip replacements and cataract surgery. Publicly run hospitals would be allowed to subcontract to private clinics for such procedures when the hospitals were unable to deliver the services within six months. The plan is to be introduced in the provincial Legislature for passage before the summer.

"We're putting the private sector to work for the public," Mr. Charest told reporters. "We're taking a measured step in this direction."

Mr. Charest and the province's health minister, Philippe Couillard, called for an open debate, and they did not rule out more privatization in the future. Quebec already has about 50 private health clinics, far more than any other province, but doctors would remain forbidden to serve in both the private and public systems under the Charest plan.

Antonia Maioni, a McGill University political scientist who specializes in health care, said Mr. Charest had to be careful about pushing too hard for privatization because he knew unions and other liberals would resist sweeping changes.

"They are trying to stay politically afloat," Ms. Maioni said, noting Mr. Charest's low standing in opinion polls only a year or two before the next provincial elections. "The winds of change are blowing, but they are not knocking everything over."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative elected last month, did not propose a sweeping overhaul of the system in the recent national campaign. But he did favor guaranteed waiting times for services. As a free-market Conservative, he is thought to favor the Supreme Court decision and will probably try to use it to encourage changes.

The departing Liberal government opposed fundamental changes. But the new health minister, Tony Clement, is a proponent of experimentation and innovations to reduce waiting, modernize equipment and increase the supply of doctors.

    Ruling Has Canada Planting Seeds of Private Health Care, NYT, 20.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/international/americas/20canada.html

A Powerful Start by Conservatives in Canadian Vote

January 24, 2006
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

TORONTO, Jan. 23 - Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party defeated the long entrenched Liberal Party in Canadian elections on Monday. A Conservative victory is a striking turn in the country's politics and is likely to improve Canada's strained relations with the Bush administration.

Prime Minister Paul Martin had hoped to build on a string of four consecutive Liberal national election victories in the past 13 years, but his campaign was damaged by two years of investigations into party scandals that spurred a backlash and a desire for change.

Mr. Martin tried to cut into Mr. Harper's lead in the final days with a campaign of rancorous advertising, as opinion polls indicated that many urban voters were wary of allowing the country to veer into uncharted ideological waters.

But in the end, Mr. Harper seemed to reassure the public that he had evolved into a centrist in recent years and that his government would emphasize cutting taxes and cleaning up corruption, rather than social issues like abortion and gay rights.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation declared a conservative victory on Monday night, but said the party would not win a majority in the 308-seat House of Commons.

Early results showed the Conservatives leading in 116 districts to 99 for the Liberals, followed by the Bloc Québécois with 50 districts and the labor-aligned New Democratic Party with 26.

The Bloc Québécois appeared to be falling short of its goal of winning a symbolically important majority in Quebec because of the Conservative gains. The Conservatives showed strength across the country, but particularly in rural and suburban areas.

Mr. Harper, 46, is a free-market economist who expressed strong support for Washington at the time of the American-led invasion of Iraq and shares the Bush administration's skepticism of the Kyoto climate control protocol, which Canada has signed and ratified. His party was formed three years ago as a coalition of two conservative parties.

Such positions are in sharp contrast with those of Prime Minister Martin, who rejected cooperation with President Bush's missile defense program, ratcheted up criticism of American trade policies and caustically criticized Washington during the campaign for not supporting the Kyoto protocol.

Mr. Harper did not emphasize his closeness to the Bush administration during the campaign, and there was no indication that Canadians had suddenly embraced American foreign policy. Mr. Harper pointedly promised not to send Canadian troops to Iraq, and said he would be a tough bargainer in trade talks with the United States.

But he did promise $5 billion in new military spending, which would go to forming a new airborne battalion and buying large transport aircraft to airlift troops and supplies during world crises. He also pledged to increase foreign aid to expand Canadian influence around the world.

Unless Mr. Harper wins a clear majority in the lower house, another national election could come within two years.

He will probably have to compromise with lawmakers from three left-of-center parties to pass legislation and remain in power. But in foreign policy the prime minister has broad powers, and Mr. Harper is expected to reach out quickly to Washington to improve a relationship that has been declining since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Canada opposed.

"It is in the DNA of this Harper government to improve the relationship with Washington," Janice Stein, director of the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, said before the vote was counted."

In domestic affairs, Mr. Harper promised to provide allowances to families with children under age 6 to help with child care, to introduce mandatory prison sentences for serious drug trafficking and gun crimes, to reduce the national sales tax and to provide tax breaks for retirees.

Mr. Martin promised a vast government-financed child care program, tax cuts for the middle class and a ban on handguns, and said he was committed to cleaning up pollution in the Great Lakes. He emphasized the period of prosperity and social peace under the recent Liberal governments.

But as Mr. Martin fell behind in the opinion polls, his campaign came to rely on attack advertisements that were unusually caustic for Canada. He tried to depict Mr. Harper as a fanatical American-style conservative and an ally of President Bush, who is unpopular in Canada. Mr. Martin warned that Mr. Harper would work against international controls on global warming and in favor of missile defense.

The campaign lasted two months, unusually long for Canada, because of holidays. But a turning point came on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, during a break in the campaigning, when an innocent 15-year-old girl and six others were wounded in a shootout between two gangs in downtown Toronto.

That unusual appearance of public lawlessness was followed by hints of lawlessness within the government. On Dec. 28, the federal police announced that they were opening a criminal investigation of what appeared to be a flurry of insider trading, set off by what some suspect were leaks from the Finance Ministry about changes in taxes on dividends and income trusts.

" The biggest surprise of the campaign was the breakthrough Mr. Harper made in Quebec, where the Conservatives have been weak for a generation. By taking votes from the Bloc Québécois, he dealt a blow to a sovereignty movement that had been rebounding on a wave of anger over Liberal scandals.

"That there is a room for a new federalist voice in Quebec is a Rubicon," said Antonia Maioni, a political scientist at McGill University.

    A Powerful Start by Conservatives in Canadian Vote, NYT, 24.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/international/americas/24canada.html?hp&ex=1138165200&en=01040e32f782a592&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Conservative Win in Canada Could Help Repair Ties to U.S.

January 23, 2006
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

TORONTO, Jan. 22 - Unless every national poll here is amiss, what has been perhaps the world's winningest political party is heading toward a humiliating defeat on Monday.

Stephen Harper, 46, an economist and social conservative who is writing a history of ice hockey, appears poised to lead his Conservative Party to victory over the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Paul Martin, something that seemed highly improbable just a few weeks ago. The Liberals won the last four national elections, governing Canada for 13 years - as the party did for three-quarters of the past century.

But whether a Harper victory would represent a seismic shift, in a country that has long promoted itself as a beacon of social democracy and frequent critic of American foreign policy, remains an open question. If he cannot muster a majority in the House of Commons, Mr. Harper may lead a weak, unstable government opposed by three left-of-center parties represented in Parliament.

Mr. Harper - in a campaign largely free of ideology - promised to cut the national sales tax, grant families child care for preschoolers and introduce mandatory prison sentences. A longtime member of the House of Commons representing Alberta, he has a conservative record, but steered clear in recent months of promising major changes to the national health insurance program.

The absence of strong ideological overtones would appear to make a Thatcherite-style revolution unlikely, even in the face of a strong Conservative showing. Mr. Harper even noted that judges appointed by Liberal governments and an appointed Senate filled with Liberals would serve as checks on his power.

"I'm basically a cautious person," Mr. Harper said in a recent speech. "I believe it's better to light one candle than to promise a million light bulbs."

A change in Ottawa would almost certainly bring, at the least, a warming of relations with Washington, which have been strained since the American-led invasion of Iraq and have worsened over a series of recent trade disputes and Canadian moves to soften domestic drug laws.

Mr. Harper, while careful not to appear overly supportive of President Bush, has suggested he would reconsider Canada's refusal to join the American missile defense program. He has also promised to increase military spending and make a bigger contribution to NATO and peacekeeping operations in places like Haiti and Afghanistan. But he also said recently that he had no intention of sending troops to Iraq.

Mr. Martin, a former finance minister and shipping executive, has tried to emphasize the Liberal government's stewardship of the strong national economy, marked by low inflation and unemployment, a strengthening currency and a large budget surplus. He has promised to create a national child care program, expand aid grants to college students and ban handguns.

These are not unpopular stances, but the decline of Liberal fortunes is due less to any shift in Canadian public opinion than to two years of federal inquiries. Those investigations documented an embarrassing party money-laundering and campaign-finance scheme that had been devised to counter separatists after the close referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1995.

Adding to the Liberal Party troubles, in the middle of the campaign, federal police investigators announced that they were looking into reports of possible Liberal government leaks of tax information to friendly investors that had spurred a flurry of insider trading.

And in Quebec, once a bastion of Liberal support, the party's free fall quickened with the publication of a book documenting allegations that the federal government had laundered millions of dollars of illegal aid to a group opposing separatists during the referendum campaign.

In recent weeks, the Liberals tried to recover votes with advertisements linking Mr. Harper to Mr. Bush, who is unpopular in Canada, and suggestions in speeches that Mr. Harper would attempt to reverse the legalization of same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

"A Harper victory will put a smile on George W. Bush's face," one Martin commercial said.

Various national polls in the final days of the campaign showed the Conservatives about 10 points ahead of the Liberals, but the Conservatives could still fail to win a majority in the House of Commons.

Mr. Harper leads a party that only three years ago merged a very conservative Canadian Alliance party with the much more moderate Progressive Conservative party.

"There are different factions and backgrounds and points of view in the Conservative coalition," noted Desmond Morton, a McGill University historian. It will not be easy to manage the factions, he said.

Mr. Harper's greatest success so far has been his surprising breakthrough in socially liberal Quebec, by taking votes away from both the Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois.

    Conservative Win in Canada Could Help Repair Ties to U.S., NYT, 23.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/international/americas/23canada.html