So let’s get this straight. West Vancouver businesswoman Mumtaz Ladha invites an employee from her hair salon business in Tanzania to visit Canada on a visitor’s visa and allows her to stay at her home.
Just before the visa is set to expire, the woman runs to the police with a claim — now determined by the courts to be bogus — that Ladha had turned her into a slave.
Ladha gets charged with human smuggling and before that accusation has even been proven in court, B.C.’s over-reaching provincial government civil-forfeiture cowboys start the process of impounding the poor lady’s house (co-owned with her daughters, who had nothing to do with the accusation) as a proceed of crime. The Tanzanian “victim” — who we can’t name because of a court order that continues despite the judge finding her allegations “improbable” and that she showed a “callous disregard for her benefactor and the truth” — will now likely get to stay in Canada. Hold on, you say, what was that last bit? You heard right.
While millions of honest, hard-working people from around the world would love to immigrate to Canada and would be great citizens, our immigration rules are so messed up that we’re going to admit a liar and a cheat, whoever she is?
Fabulous. Just fabulous. Government is supposed to protect us from people like Miss Tanzania. Instead, in this case, overzealous cops, Crown and civil-forfeiture bureaucrats harmed an innocent citizen. Thank God for defence attorneys.
Editorials are unsigned opinion pieces that represent the views of The Province editorial board, a group of senior editors.
The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@theprovince.com. Letters to the editor can be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.
