Father of Canadian held in Mexico slams Ottawa, Baird defends response

TORONTO – Nearly every day Cynthia Vanier lines up in a Mexican prison to place a collect call home to her parents in Brampton, Ont. The chats are short, sometimes emotions run high and there’s always an effort to keep everyone’s spirits up.

But nearly five months after she was placed behind bars, her family says it’s hard to stay positive when Canada has done so little to help one of its own citizens.

Vanier, who is from Mount Forest, Ont., is charged in Mexico for allegedly trying to smuggle late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s son into the country. She was arrested in November and charged in February.

For her husband and her parents, the last five months have been a nightmare.

“We’re not used to this. We always thought that Canada would stand up for their citizens particularly when they haven’t been proven guilty of anything,” Vanier’s father John MacDonald told The Canadian Press in an interview.

“What help the Canadian government has been? None.”

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird defended the Canadian government’s response to the Vanier case during an appearance in Washington on Thursday.

“Ms. Vanier faces serious charges involving providing aid to a suspected war criminal, to someone who is under UN sanction for human rights violations. And just because you’re a Canadian, we can’t pick up the phone and call the Mexican government and say: ‘Yeah, this is a Canadian, she clearly didn’t do it, can you please send her home,'” Baird said.

“If the Mexican president were to phone me and say: ‘Can you get this Mexican out of jail,’ I would have zero capacity to do that. She’s facing incredibly serious charges and will have to face them in court.”

Vanier hasn’t been tried, nor has she been able to file an appeal. But Mexican President Felipe Calderon has cited her case, in a meeting with his Canadian and U.S. counterparts, as an example of how well his country is handling security issues.

Those comments, made during the North American Leaders summit last week, came as a shock to Vanier’s father.

“When you get Calderon talking about it at the level he did, you suddenly realize how political this is in Mexico,” he said.

MacDonald said his efforts to have the Canadian government help get his daughter home seem to have hit a brick wall. He says his local MP has done little to help and officials at the Foreign Affairs Department repeatedly tell him Canada does not interfere with the laws of another country.

But MacDonald argues there’s plenty Ottawa can still do to help.

“We’re not asking them to interfere with a legal system, we’re asking them to look at the civil rights issues that they do have a say in.”

MacDonald said Canada wasn’t informed of his daughter’s incarceration until she was behind bars for four days and she was held without being charged for longer than Mexico’s laws allowed.

He also said, for all it’s claims that it couldn’t intervene, Canada still sent RCMP to talk to his daughter in her Mexican prison just over a week ago but officers warned her not to speak of the encounter.

“They’re saying ‘we can’t do anything about it,’ yet they’re sending our national police force down there to interview her,” he said. “It gets very frustrating.”

Vanier was questioned as a “witness” by RCMP, but wasn’t allowed to have her lawyer present and was told she’d be charged with obstruction of justice is she refused to co-operate, her father said.

“That’s a threat, you wouldn’t get away with that in Canada.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs has previously said Canada was interacting with Mexican authorities on Vanier’s behalf “as required,” especially to ensure the medical concerns she had were addressed. They also repeatedly said she faced “very serious” allegations.

To her family, that’s an indicator that the government isn’t pushing hard enough on Vanier’s file.

“Yes, they’re serious charges, but why are you assuming she’s guilty? Do something to help her prove her innocence,” MacDonald argued. “She is innocent, trust me. It’s all going to come out eventually.”

Prosecutors have alleged Vanier and at least three others conspired to sneak Al-Saadi Gadhafi and his family into the country, renting an airplane to fly them to Mexico. They said the attempt was foiled because the pilots refused to land secretly.

Vanier has maintained that her only connection to Libya was through Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin which had various lucrative projects in the middle eastern country.

In February, the company announced it had parted ways with two executives after acknowledging that the conduct of its employees has recently been questioned in public. The development came after a published report said there was internal turmoil at the firm over its involvement with Vanier.

— with files from Lee-Anne Goodman in Washington.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version misspelled the last name of Cynthia Vanier’s father.