The imam of Ottawa’s main mosque will not be kicked out of Canada after intervention from Conservative and NDP MPs.
Khaled Abdul-Hamid Syed received a new visa on Wednesday, slightly less than a month after a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada informed Khaled his application for an extended work permit had been denied and he would have to reapply from outside of the country.
That left him, his wife and their two-year-old son in legal limbo and stripped them of their Ontario health insurance coverage.
“I want to thank the Canadian government, especially the minister of citizenship (Jason Kenney) and Gordon O’Connor,” Khaled said Wednesday night.
He also also expressed gratitude to NDP MP Paul Dewar, in whose Ottawa Centre riding the Northwestern Avenue mosque is located.
Dewar last week expressed optimism that the situation would be cleared up quickly.
Khaled wrote to O’Connor on March 25, explaining that a letter sent by a handful of now former Ottawa Muslim Association directors rejecting his appointment as imam had found its way to immigration officials, but the association had since extended his contract until July 2011.
Khaled had been sent to Canada by Egypt’s Department of Religious Affairs, which pays his salary, after mosque leaders could not find a suitable Canadian candidate in 2008.
However, a handful of OMA directors wanted to keep trying for a Canadian imam, which led them to write a letter to the Egyptian Embassy, stating they did not want to keep Khaled in Canada.
This led to the rejection of Khaled’s first application for an extension, which had been submitted well before his visa expired.
Khaled then sent a second application with letters from the OMA and the Egyptian embassy confirming his appointment, but his visa had expired by that point and immigration officials told him he would have to leave Canada before he could reapply.
“I was told that this decision was made because my application was received after the expiration of my visa, which is contrary to the facts,” Khaled wrote in his letter to O’Connor, the Conservative MP for Carleton-Mississippi Mills and the chief government whip. “The follow-up request was just a clarification for the record, which was misunderstood by the (immigration) officer.”
Idris Ben-Tahir, a member of the Muslim community who took the imam to see O’Connor, credited the Tory whip with getting the problem resolved.
The new visa will see Khaled through to the end of his appointment in July 2011, Ben-Tahir said.
Ben-Tahir said the imam’s first mission outside Egypt has been an eventful one.
“He doesn’t know much about bureaucracy,” he said. “He has learned a lot, I guess.”
Though there were rumblings of allegations of discrimination, Khaled refused to blame anything other than a bureaucratic snafu for his situation.
“This (was) a misunderstanding,” he said. “There is no discrimination.”
There was one more lesson for the imam on Wednesday. On the same day that he received his visa extension, while he was downtown trying to work out a problem with OHIP coverage, his car was towed.
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