Ukrainian Canadian

For a man who spent a career with the KGB and enforcing its rules, Mikhail Lennikov has a lot of trouble following them from a Canadian judge: Get out of Canada – no spies allowed! If your knowledge of the KGB only comes from movies, it was the Soviet Union’s secret police – out living Nazi’s Gestapo police by 60 years and killed and enslaved more innocent people than Hitler by an order of magnitude!

The facts speak for themselves:

• Lennikov, a former leader of the Communist Youth League, was recruited into the KGB in 1982 after leaving university and worked first as a translator than as a spy for Japanese businesses.
• He left the KGB in 1988, and left Russia in 1995 for Japan.
• He came to Canada in 1997 on a student visa without disclosing his KGB past (otherwise he would have never been admitted).
• Applying for permanent residency in the Fall of 2008, Lennikov’s background as a KGB officer was disclosed and their application was denied under Section 34 (1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, deemed a security risk and his family ordered to be deported:
  

  34. (1) A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on security grounds for
  (a) engaging in an act of espionage or an act of subversion against a democratic government, institution or process as they are understood in Canada;
  (b) engaging in or instigating the subversion by force of any government;
  (c) engaging in terrorism;
  (d) being a danger to the security of Canada;
  (e) engaging in acts of violence that would or might endanger the lives or safety of persons in Canada; or
  (f) being a member of an organization that there are reasonable grounds to believe engages, has engaged or will engage in acts referred to in paragraph (a), (b) or (c).

• March 2009 -  Lennikov’s wife and son were granted permanent residency in March on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
• June 1 2009 – A judge denied the appeal of Lennikov, disputing the man’s claim his life would be at risk in Russia as he would be considered a traitor.
• June 3 2009 – Lennikov was ordered to board a flight for Vladivostok, Russia, but has taken sanctuary with his family at First Lutheran Church by Rev. Richard Hergesheimer.
• Since then there hasn’t been many updates, besides some opportune political photo-ops.

It’s all about image

Left-leaning media outlets took up the cause to defend the Lennkiovs in a manner befitting his KGB ways – airbrushing his unpleasant past, as we noted earlier. Their journalists, not daring to consult actual lawyers are even interpreting Canada’s laws themselves in order to benefit their case. Many took the cause as an opportunity to slam the Conservative Harper government and the issue became more about politics than enforcing the law ( Vancouver is mostly Liberal/NDP):

23 members of Parliament co-signed a letter Tuesday to Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney and Van Loan, urging them to halt the deportation order.

Liberal, Bloc Quebecois and New Democrat MPs spoke about the urgency of stopping the deportation order.

Conservative Selkirk-Interlake MP James Bezan recently introduced Bill M-356 to try and uphold the integrity of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act:

“Canada should not be a safe haven for terrorists or former members of any communist state’s secret police forces,” Bezan stated. “People that have been members of organizations such as the KGB, Gestapo, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban do not meet the requirements for entry to Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.  If they have entered Canada, then they should be deported,” said Bezan.

Who’s upholding the law?

With all the media backlash, few have come out to support our government’s decision to uphold the law. The Ukrainian community in Canada have been out responding to articles written about in the media – mainly, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the incredible effort by chairman of Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association Lubomyr Luciuk who has appeared in various news outlets.

Can he outlast Immigration?

Will hiding out in a sanctuary work? It’s been done before:

University of Windsor professor Randy Lippert, who wrote Sanctuary, Sovereignty and Sacrifice, said seeking sanctuary has proved to be a successful tactic for people with immigration troubles. Since 1983, Prof. Lippert said, the success rate for migrants who sought refuge in a place of worship was 73 per cent when he conducted a study in 2003.

However, in recent years, the length of time sanctuary seekers spent waiting grew from an average of 19 days to more than 650 days, Prof. Lippert said. And the success rates have been dropping in recent years.

Dangerous Precedent

If Lennikov beats the law and stays in Canada – what will that mean for the other KGB killers who already enjoy life here?

They called themselves Chekists — the sword and shield of the Soviet Union. They were proud of what they were. Some served as concentration camp guards. Others were executioners. Many were just clerks or cooks or those ordinary guys who mop up the mess after the torturers are done.

Over the years they had different names — Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, SMERSH and, most notoriously, KGB. Yet their job description didn’t change. They were killers. They murdered whomever their masters wanted dead. Their victims numbered in the many millions.

…

An intrepid journalist broke this story in a national Canadian newspaper in April 2005. Yet after that original exposé, all followup stories were spiked. Even more intriguing is that the RCMP’s war crimes unit, asked to investigate allegations about Communist collaborators in Canada, responded with the rather limp finding that they had insufficient evidence upon which to act.

That reply took more than three years to draft. Apparently when a man admits he was in the NKVD and brags about the people he did in and provides his memoirs in English in a book available in libraries across the land, the Mounties don’t define that as proof of any wrongdoing. Maybe they’re waiting for Hollywood to turn the manuscript into a movie.

Only time will tell