(The following article is from the April 1-15, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Johan Boyden, General Secretary, Young Communist League of Canada

On one side of Canada stood a man who, for my generation, personifies the great evil of the US empire. On March 17 he was warmly welcomed to Calgary by the governing Harper Conservatives. From outside the $400‑plate luncheon of business and oil executives, over 200 protestors chanted, expressing the sentiments of the Canadian people.

     On the other side of the country well over a thousand people - in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal - had pulled $10 out of their wallets to hear an outspoken anti‑war crusader. On March 20, this man was banned from entering Canada for posing a threat to national security.

     The first case is George W Bush. If what resonates with the Canadian people had been recognized in Ottawa, then the clarion call contained in a letter from Lawyers Against the War to the RCMP would have been heard. Bush would have been arrested for crimes against humanity. He was not.

     The second case is rebel British MP George Galloway, a mighty and eloquent speaker. Galloway, who left Britain's Labour party in 2003 and now sits as a left‑wing Respect MP, has hurled repeated barrages of verbal criticism against the oppression and injustice of US, Israeli, British, and Canadian foreign policy. For this he has been censured. People's Voice readers already know the answer to the question: will this public outcry resonate with the Canadian government?

     If you don't know who Galloway is, search his name and "Senate hearing" on You Tube to hear him speak. He is the man who famously crossed the Atlantic to address a US Senate hearing that had falsely accused him of corruption:

     "I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster which you did commit in Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies... Senator, in everything I said, about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And a hundred thousand people have paid with their lives, sixteen hundred of them American soldiers, sent to their deaths, on a pack of lies."

     George Galloway has been to Canada before. In 2006, he told CBC's George Stroumboulopoulos that "your foreign policy has changed markedly even in the twelve months or so since I was last here, it has a sharper, uglier edge."

     Apparently the Harper Conservative government cannot handle such criticism, or any at all.

     It was entirely appropriate that an emergency planning session responding to Galloway's ban came at the end of a three‑day student anti‑war conference in Toronto - a meeting talking about issues from the increasingly aggressive military recruitment campaigns to the carbon footprint of NATO.

     The emergency session heard numerous reports of similar clamp-downs on freedom of speech. High school teachers and students with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid spoke of the heavy‑handed approach of the Toronto School Board and university administrations (reported in our last issue). The War Resistors have seen four resistors and young families deported by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's department. The Canadian Arab Federation's funding is being cut by Kenney not because of any action, but a political statement.

     "We have to funnel the outrage of the Canadian public towards Harper," Toronto Coalition to Stop the War spokesperson James Clark said. The group is launching a legal challenge led by Barbara Jackman. If that doesn't work a delegation of Canadian MPs, lawyers and activists will escort Galloway across the border from the US.

     The burning issue here is freedom of speech - even Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff gets that.

     Galloway joins a growing list of progressives not allowed into Canada, from US women's peace activists with Code Pink, to William Ayers and anti‑war folk musician David Rovics, and hip hop artist Immortal technique. Nor were they the first.

     As Galloway himself said: "More than half a century ago Paul Robeson, one of the greatest men who ever lived, was forbidden to enter Canada not by Ottawa but by Washington, which had taken away his passport. But he was still able to transfix a vast crowd of Vancouver's mill hands and miners with a 17‑minute telephone concert, culminating in a rendition of the Ballad of Joe Hill. Technology has moved on since then. And so from coast to coast, minister Kenney notwithstanding, I will be heard ‑ one way or another."