As refugees from Swat slowly begin to trickle back home, or perhaps a place they once used to call home, there’s an interesting parallel taking place in our very own backyard. Federal court judge Sean Harrington upheld a deportation order which would split a Pakistani family down the middle, parents from children, on the basis of a lie on an application form.

I’ll let you read the article and come to your own conclusions, but for me it brought up a lecture by Janice Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies, where she talks about the phenomena of accountability that we as Canadians increasingly hold dear to us.

A Public Safety spokesperson in the above article mentions that “the removal of inadmissible individuals is key to maintaining the integrity of the immigration program”, which is a fair statement. The government is indeed accountable to its lawfully residing citizens and immigrants that their procedure is fair and objective. In the case of the Sheikh family, Mr. Sheikh may volunteer at a health clinic as a translator, and he may manage a popular grocery store, and he may completely integrate into Canadian society and essentially embody the perfect case for refugee status as one could find, aside from fleeing from the country where Mr. Sheikh’s father and nephew were killed for political reasons. The fact that he lied on his application form means that he and his wife must make the difficult decision to leave Canada without the children they arrived with. This makes complete sense in Canada’s judicial system, because of our country’s inability to broaden the definition of accountability to beyond things that we can measure.

Lost in the standardization of our values is a word that is not found often enough in our parliament or newspapers today, the word that represents the accountability we have to ourselves: Responsibility. Stein argues that we have become so pre-occupied with accountability that it has actually taken away from the idea of responsibility that used to be at the soul of our government. In this culture of accountability, we constantly seek better systems, better information, and better checks and balances to ensure mutual compliance. In exchange, we’ve lost our conscience and our creativity in dealing with some of the most serious ethical problems we have today, whether it’s corporate or health industry whistleblowers, or in this case, our immigration policy.

Have Canadian institutions lost their soul?

Maybe not. Less than two years ago, judge Sean Harrington, the same judge who yesterday ordered Mr. and Mrs. Sheikh to return to Pakistan, presided over a trial of a man who was scheduled for deportation to Brazil. Compared to Mr. Sheikh, Mr. Diogo Cichaczewski had been caught selling stolen credit cards and duplicate cards made from identity theft on the street and was given a suspended sentence and probation. While scheduled for deportation back to Brazil and having his appeal denied twice, Mr. Cichaczewski married a Canadian Jewish woman and decided to convert to Judaism. Judge Harrington ruled in Mr. Cichaczewski’s case that:

“While Canada’s focus is on removing an individual who has no legal status here, an unfortunate repercussion is that his conversion would be delayed“

And with that, Mr. Cichaczewski was allowed to stay. Given the fact that nothing would prevent Mr. Cichaczewski from converting in Brazil, this judgment of Judge Harrington was clearly, as one lawyer put it, “an enormous stretch of what the Constitution allows.” However, it does allow it, and ultimately the judge was able to make an irresponsible decision outside of the limits of accountability.

While we’re looking at the “unfortunate repercussion” of deporting Mr. Cichaczewski, how does one less volunteer at a health clinic, closing a community’s popular grocery store, putting someone’s life at risk, and splitting a family in half look?

In a political culture where accountability blindfolds responsibility, it looks fine.

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