The Decibel - A senator sent inauthentic documents to stranded Afghans

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

In the final days of a chaotic government effort to rescue people from the Taliban last summer, Senator Marilou McPhedran and one of her staff members sent travel documents to a family attempting to flee Afghanistan. The documents, called facilitation letters, were supposed to help the Afghans bypass checkpoints that had been set up around Kabul’s airport, so they could catch one of the last evacuation flights out of the country. A year later, the people who received those documents are still stuck in Afghanistan. And the Canadian government has at last explained why: the facilitation letters they received from the senator and her office were not authentic, and the people named on them had not been approved to come to Canada.The Globe’s Marieke Walsh explains what happened, how government officials are responding, and what this means for the people still stuck in Afghanistan.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Back in August last year, it was chaos around the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Taliban had just taken over, diplomats from around the world had scrambled to get out, and thousands of Afghans were trying to flee the country. Many had been promised refuge in Canada and were pleading for help from our government. Some of them were given documents to help them get out. But in the case of at least one family in Afghanistan, the documents they were given were not authentic. These documents came from the office of a Canadian senator. They looked legitimate, but the people who received them had not been approved to come to Canada.

I mean, I think it raises a lot of questions about the effectiveness of Canada's program that a senator felt the need to go to these lengths. The Globe's Marika Walsh broke this story. She's here to explain what happened, how government officials are responding, and what this means for the people still stuck in Afghanistan. This is The Decibel. Marika, it's great to see you again. Thank you so much for chatting with me. Hi, Manika. Thanks so much for having me on. So I think we should just jump into this because this is a really kind of crazy story here. What exactly happened

with these letters? What did you find out? It's really complicated and has sort of a lot of outstanding questions, to be honest, and things that we don't know. But what we do know is that the family of one of Michelle Rempel-Garner's constituents in Afghanistan received facilitation letters, is what they're called. They're immigration documents, essentially, from Senator Marilu McFedren and her office in the absolute heat of the chaos and turbulence in Afghanistan in August 2021. The documents look very official. They have Government of Canada logo. They have a Global Affairs Canada stamp. They are very similar to valid facilitation letter that we have also viewed. And what we learned is the problem is that the documents that were sent by the senator and her

office were not authentic and the people named on them were not approved to come to Canada. And that's created a problem for the family in Afghanistan because when they received those documents, you can imagine they were expecting that the worst was over. And instead, they've been stuck in limbo in Afghanistan ever since. Yeah. Wow. OK, so you mentioned MP Michelle Rempel-Garner. She's, of course, a a longtime advocate for equal rights. She was central to ensuring that there was equal rights between the sexes brought into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the 1980s. That earned her an Order of Canada for her work. She has a long history of advocating for women's rights and the rights of minorities,

not just in Canada, but also around the world and in developing countries. And in 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recommended her to the Senate. Okay, so let's go back to Afghanistan last summer then just to remind people, I guess, what it was like in August of 2021. Why did people need these letters? What was going on? Afghanistan descended into complete chaos very quickly last summer. it is that NATO countries were completely taken off guard by how quickly the Taliban took over during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after so many years of a NATO presence in the country. And during the war, they had promised that the people who worked with them in Afghanistan as

interpreters, as fixers, as security, at embassy staff, that they would be able to come to Canada or to other countries for refuge if they chose to resettle here. And in the case of Canada, Janice Dixon has reported that people asked for this special immigration program to be set up more than a decade ago, and it was only set up the month before the Taliban took over. And so Canada's immigration system was completely overwhelmed by demand and requests for these special immigration program applications and visas, at the same time that our ability to process them became much more hampered because Canada closed its embassy and withdrew its diplomatic staff from Afghanistan. And Justin Trudeau called a snap election.

So at the same time that Afghanistan was descending into chaos, Canada's government went into a form of caretaker mode. And the stories of desperation really are remarkable and heartbreaking. We saw images of people trying to cling to the outside of airplanes. There's that image that nobody can forget of an infant baby being passed up to American soldiers over barbed wire barricades. So there was desperation in Afghanistan, and Canada's immigration system was not able to sustain and process the overwhelming demand that it was facing. I'm glad you reminded us of what was going on at that time, because

those things that you mentioned, those are stories of really intense desperation. There are people wanted to get out of the country as fast as they could. So these letters, these facilitation papers, essentially, that weitation papers, essentially, that we're talking about today, what exactly were they supposed to do? What was happening is that people faced multiple challenges, from what we understand. There was the challenge of getting approved for a visa to Canada or to another Western country. But then there was also the challenge logistically of getting from wherever they were in hiding from the Taliban in Afghanistan to a place that they could safely be transported out of the country. So in this case, we're talking about what were called letters of facilitation that if somebody was in possession of was supposed to help them get through Taliban checkpoints

to get to the airport in Kabul. And those images in Afghanistan from that time a summer ago really show just absolute masses of people trying to get through. And so that was very important documentation to have. Importantly, the documentation says very specifically that the Canadian government has validated that the people named have been approved for a visa, and it asks the people who are presented with these documents to ensure that the people named on them are granted passage through blockades to get to the airport. So the document says that they have been approved, and they should be allowed safe transport

to the airport. And the issue that we have come across in this reporting with this story is that, as I mentioned earlier, the people named on the documents in this case sent by the senator's office were not approved. What do we know about this family, the people named on those documents? So what we know is from Michelle Rumpelgarner and from a letter that she sent to Immigration Minister Sean Frazier.

In our reporting of this, we obtained documents, both that show the documents that were sent by Senator McFedden's office, as well as these communications between Immigration Minister Sean Frazier and Conservative MP Michelle Rumpelgarner. And the family at the center of this in Afghanistan has not spoken with the globe out of fear of their own safety and security in Afghanistan. But what we understand from these letters is that they are in danger in Afghanistan, they're in hiding in Afghanistan, and that they are desperate to get out. And they thought that they had this opportunity to leave in receiving these letters, but that opportunity was not legitimate or real, and they have since missed that window.

Okay, so this sounds like there's actually ramifications for them that they got these documents that turned out to not be authentic then. Absolutely, and I think we should maybe rewind a little bit to the actual letters and to what happened with Senator McFedren's office. Senator McFedren and her staff sent these documents to this family. And she says that they were provided to her, a template of the facilitation letters was provided to her by a global affairs official, by a senior person in government, and that she was sending them in good faith.

And it was her understanding that they could be used and they could be sent to help people in desperate situations get through the blockades and get to the airport. What's the main concern about what happened here? Well, the concern for this family is that they might have missed a window to apply for immigration to Canada and actually be successful in it. to figure out the status of this family's applications because while they had received these facilitation letters, they weren't getting help from the government of Canada. And they believed they were legitimate and authentic and that in receiving them, they had been approved to come to Canada. They have documents that show that they worked with the government while they were in Afghanistan.

They also applied through the immigration measures program last summer. The government says that first application was lost. And when they finally decided to apply again while they were in this sort of information void about what the status of their first application was, they were told that the program they were applying under had no more spaces left. And they are now stuck in Afghanistan with no clear path out. And so how did the family actually find out that these documents were not authentic? Michelle Rempel-Garner's office had been trying to assess the status of the application for this family for months and months and months. And the government in that time had not clarified the status of those precise letters that they received early on. In the summer of this year, in July, they, for the first time, acknowledged to Michelle Rumpelgarner's office that the

facilitation letters that she was referencing were not authentic and that they determined that they were not authentic through an internal review that they had done. So we don't have any details from the government about when this internal review started, how long it took, and who else might be involved in it, who else might be named in it. All we know is that one was completed at some point in the last year and referred to police. Okay, so Senator Mary Lou McFedren, did she acknowledge then that the documents were inauthentic? No, she, in her interview with The Globe and emails to The Globe and in two letters sent by her lawyer, defended her efforts to save vulnerable Afghans at the time. And they are now subject to a really brutal regime under the Taliban. She has acknowledged using a template facilitation letter, but she denied that the documents were fake or that she used them in any unauthorized way. Senator McFedren says that she was working day and night in that

time period in August 2021 with NGOs, with advocacy groups, trying to get their staff and the people they had worked with out of Afghanistan. And this is a story that we've heard several times. This is not unique to her. There are many groups across Canada and around the world who have been trying to do the same thing, who were lobbying government officials and doing everything that they felt they could to help the people who were stuck that Canada had promised to help but was no longer able to or was too slow to help. We'll be right back.

You mentioned that Senator McFedren says that she was given approval by a high-level government official. Do we know who else might have been involved? We know from the senator's comments to us that she says that somebody, a senior official within the government of Canada, had sent her the templates and that she had also says that she notified people within the government about her work. But she said that she or her lawyer told us that she was not at liberty to share the documents that show that. And the government of Canada says that they won't comment because they don't want to affect the integrity of any investigation. Huh. Okay. And you said it had been referred to police then.

So what are the next steps there? That's another big question mark. It's one of the challenges of some of our reporting in Ottawa is that people are quite tight-lipped often with information. The police and Canada Border Services Agency say they won't comment at all unless charges are laid in a case. So they won't even tell us if they have launched an investigation. We simply don't know where it goes from here or if it goes anywhere from here in terms of investigations. You know, another big question is if somebody in government was involved in sending these documents to the senator in her office, what happened to that person? The government won't acknowledge that somebody else was involved. And if they were, we don't know what happened to them either.

Marika, do we know if anyone actually made it to Canada using these documents? A government source has told us that nobody arrived in Canada using inauthentic documents. But what they couldn't answer is how many people or if any people were able to escape from Afghanistan using these documents or other ones. We also don't know whether this is more widespread. The senator and her lawyer would not say whether similar documents were sent to other people or if this was just a one-off case. So there are many things that we don't know about this case. But what's important about this particular situation is that in receiving these documents, this family believed that they had a way out of Afghanistan,

and it turns out that they didn't. There's been a lot of criticism around the disorganization of the efforts to bring Afghans who helped the Canadian government here to Canada. How does this situation with these letters fit into that broader criticism? Well, I mean, I think it raises a lot of questions about the effectiveness of Canada's program that a senator felt the need to go to these lengths. She made very clear in an interview and in multiple email exchanges and in letters from her lawyers that she felt like she was doing everything she could to help save people in a really desperate and life-threatening situation.

And we know it's life-threatening because we know, for example, that people who helped the allied forces in Afghanistan, helped diplomatic or military missions, have been disappeared, have been tortured by the Taliban since then. And so there was a real important rush to save people last summer. And we know that not just Canada, but many other countries involved in NATO's mission were not at all successful in getting everybody out who they promised to get out. And the senator, we don't have any information beyond the situation with this one family, but her lawyers say that her efforts saved lives. So what happens now for the people who are still waiting to come to Canada? Where are they left at this point? That's a big question mark. This family is still stuck in Afghanistan in hiding,

according to the information that we have. And so are many, many others who were promised refuge in Canada or promised refuge by other countries. They're not just stuck in Afghanistan, they're stuck in neighboring countries, still trying to make sort of the final journey to Canada and to other Western nations. And so there are still a lot of questions for the government about its management of the immigration efforts last summer and the ongoing questions about what happens to the people left behind who are now in danger from the Taliban. Marika, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today Thanks so much for having me That's it for today I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer And Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.