Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service. Published: Monday, January 26, 2009

OTTAWA – The Canadian government is considering whether to keep open a high-security facility for foreign terror suspects – dubbed Guantanamo North by its critics – now that the centre is about to release its last detainee. With the pending exit of Hassan Almrei, who is being held on a controversial “security certificate” permitting the government to detain non-Canadians without charge, the six-bunk prison near Kingston, Ont., will be effectively mothballed.

With the pending release with conditions of Syrian national Hassan Almrei, who is being held on a controversial ‘security certificate’ at the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre, the six-bunk prison near Kingston, Ont., will be effectively mothballed.

With the pending release with conditions of Syrian national Hassan Almrei, who is being held on a controversial ‘security certificate’ at the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre, the six-bunk prison near Kingston, Ont., will be effectively mothballed.

“The Canada Border Services Agency is currently exploring options for the future of the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre,” media spokeswoman Tracie LeBlanc wrote in an e-mail to Canwest News Service.

LeBlanc added the agency is taking into account that all four detainees who have done time in the facility since its April 2006 opening could still be re-arrested and returned.

Critics say it’s a good time for the government to stop spending $2 million a year to operate a facility that has become a dormant symbol of Canada’s war on terror.

The pending closure of the U.S. military unit at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has also served as fodder for opponents to revive their long-standing argument that people who aren’t charged with anything should not be detained indefinitely.

“I think it represents a chapter of Canadian policy that is problematic and, with the closing of Guantanamo, I think it would be sensible to close KIHC right now, too,” said Mike Larsen, a researcher at York University’s Centre for International and Security Studies.

“There is no place in a just society for a prison designed expressly to hold non-citizens, detained without charge or trial.”

The Canadian facility was built at a cost of $3.2 million on the grounds of the maximum-security Millhaven Penitentiary in Bath, Ont., to detain non-Canadians subject to government security certificates.

The regime allows the government to hold a suspect in “administrative detention” until a judge determines whether he should be deported as a threat to national security.

“I guess the government is going to have to decide whether they’re going to keep (the prison) open, and they’re going to have to think about whether they’re likely to be issuing new certificates in the future,” said Almrei’s lawyer, Lorne Waldman.

“If not, it doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense to spend millions of dollars a year to keep a facility open if it’s empty.”

It has been almost six years since the government issued a new security certificate against a terror suspect, and the regime has been under attack in the courts, including a 2007 ruling in the Supreme Court of Canada that declared the process unconstitutional and forced the government to revamp its process.

The Canadian Border Services Agency, when it opened the facility in April 2006, contemplated that it could be empty at times – but concluded that would not be a reason to shut it down, according to a document that Larsen obtained through federal access-to-information laws.

The memorandum of understanding between the CBSA and Corrections Canada, which operates the facility for the border agency, says the centre would remain open as long as there were still suspects in Canada who had been subject to a security certificate.

“In the event that the CBSA must re-arrest and re-detain such persons, the detainees would be detained at the KIHC,” said the memorandum.

Waldman said he hopes Almrei, a 35-year-old Syrian national whom a judge ordered released earlier this month, subject to strict conditions, will be freed within days.

Almrei, who has been detained since his October 2001 arrest in Toronto, has been the sole prisoner at the centre since April 2007. At its peak, it housed four inmates, all Muslim men, but three already have been released with conditions while the government pursues their removal from Canada.

Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan would not answer questions about the future of the holding centre, said his spokesman Chris McCluskey, who referred calls to the border services agency.