By Norma Greenaway, Canwest News Service. October 25, 2009

OTTAWA — Turning 18 in Canada would have been a dream come true for Bebe but for one heartbreaking exception – her sister, Grise, wasn’t around to share the milestone. “I miss her so much,” Bebe sobbed as she talked about the sadness that hung over the birthday meal she shared last week with her mother and friends in Toronto. Grise is dead – after taking a bullet in the forehead – and buried in Mexico, the country Bebe, Grise and their mother had been trying to flee since their father, a player in the country’s drug wars, was murdered in 2002.

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“I plead guilty, I’m a racist.” — Jason Kenney

October 23, 2009 — Migrant justice activists and organizers, with their McGill allies, confronted and disrupted Jason Kenney — Canada’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism — before and during a closed function with Conservative McGill. At least 50 protesters, in an action called by No One Is Illegal-Montreal, were able to surround Kenney in the Arts Building as he tried to enter the private event. For about one-minute, Kenney was asked about the report in today’s Toronto Star that a Mexican woman, who twice tried to apply for refugee status to Canada, was found murdered in Mexico (article is linked below). Kenney brushed off the question and didn’t answer.

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Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star, Fri Oct 23 2009

“A woman between the ages of 20 and 30 was found murdered – and with evidence of childbirth – with blows to her body and a bullet in the forehead, a classic revenge from drug trafficking,” said a June 5 story in the Mexican newspaper El Informador de Jalisco. A death certificate later classified the woman’s death as a homicide. What the coroner’s office didn’t mention was that the 24-year-old murder victim and her mother and sister had twice sought refuge in Canada, in 2004 and 2008, from drug traffickers. The same men are thought to have kidnapped and killedyoung Grise, leaving the fate of her baby unknown, after she was forced back to Mexico.

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Norma Greenaway, Canwest News Service: Tuesday, October 20, 2009

OTTAWA — Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has signalled there should be no rush to unconditionally embrace as refugees the 76 men, believed to be from Sri Lanka, who arrived on a rusting boat off Canada’s West Coast over the weekend. Kenney said Tuesday he views the case as one of human smuggling, something Canada and other countries must try to combat. “We obviously don’t want to encourage people to get into rickety boats, pay thousands of dollars, cross the oceans and come to Canada illegally,” Kenney said Tuesday in an interview.

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Justicia for Migrant Workers strongly condemns the proposed regulations introduced by the Federal Conservatives to ‘protect’ temporary foreign workers. These regulations continue the mean spirited approach of persecuting workers rather than addressing the structural mechanisms that deny migrant workers the ability to exert rights. While the legislation announces its intention to publicize exploitative employers and to deny them access to temporary foreign workers for a period of two years, J4MW believes migrant workers will disproportionately bear the burden for speaking out against injustices and abuses. Migrant workers are punished by the proposed forced disbarment for a period of six years or more from working in Canada after four years of cumulative employment, and the denial of their entry into Canada if their offer of employment is not deemed to be ‘genuine’.

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