"Sweet, and Loving"

"He is not a a bad guy. In fact, he is very sweet and loving and will often help others. He just never had anyone he could rely on and he did what he knew to survive."

"He has basically become the father of my children. He doesn't want to leave us. We've been together since my daughter was one month old."

Sweet and loving are wonderful personal characteristics. Violent and abusive most definitely are not. If and when they co-exist in someone's character, it is obvious that the violent, abusive side authorizes itself on occasion to subdue the sweet and loving component of that personality. Most people can be sweet and loving when the occasion calls for those emotions to be brought into play. Most people are capable of restraining their violent impulses.

This is called civility, it is a symbol of social and emotional maturity. But then, even among those in arrested adolescence, who often act out, violence does not necessarily ensue. Most normal people are capable of restraining their brutal impulses. Most men do not beat other men and stab them. Most men do not kick and beat a legally blind woman to the extent that she would require brain surgery, aside from suffering a broken rib and collapsed lung.

This man did those things. "The assault on his last victim is indicative of the dangerousness (sic) he poses to the Canadian public at large", noted immigration official Julie Stock in her inadmissibility report on Somali-born Abadir Ali, now on the track to deportation to war-torn Somalia. A landed resident of Canada who has racked up five adult criminal convictions, two of which represent violent assaults.

The immigration official concluded that there was nothing she could detect in the record that might even hint at the potential for rehabilitation. And the Federal Court of Canada has upheld that deportation order. Now the problem is the manner in which he will be conveyed back to Somalia. To a country whose language and customs are entirely unknown to him. So it is claimed.

He arrived in Canada in the custody of a step-mother, at the age of 8. He is now 26 years of age, having lived the greater part of his life in Canada. Most eight-year-olds are at ease in their native language, how could this man not be familiar with the language spoken to him until he reached Canada at age 8? His language skills may be rusty, but at 8 years of age, social custom and language would have been well engrained.

But he has had ample opportunity to become a good citizen, and he failed abysmally. He is to be deported. Which will ensure that the single mother of two young children who is a child and youth worker, whose intimate relationship with Abadir Ali has spanned three years, will bemoan the loss of this "sweet and funny and very caring person".

That caring person might have thought to have a care to conduct himself in a decent manner toward everyone. He did not. People are the authors of their own misfortune. We are all capable of exercising free will, and we do. This man had the capacity to become a decent human being, he chose not to.

Canada is not morally or legally obliged to retain within this country individuals who are violently abusive, have amassed a criminal record and who constitute a harm to others.