Life’s mistakes can boot you from your adopted home

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/04/2011 (5476 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We all makes mistakes in life; some are just bigger than others.

Often those are the ones we have the toughest time learning from, though.

Until, perhaps, it’s too late.

 

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Meet Timothy Hewitt.

Recovering crack cocaine addict, former bank robber, ex-husband and soon-to-be ex-con.

For a second time.

Not exactly the All-Canadian Kid, at least not on paper. In part that’s because officially he’s not a Canadian, even though he’s lived here for 47 years.

Since he was three years old, in fact.

Still, after his release from the minimum-security Rockwood Institution, Hewitt will be taken to Richardson International Airport on Monday, where he’ll be strapped in a plane seat and flown to Great Britain. Never to return.

What it amounts to is a life sentence in a country where, at age 50, Hewitt knows no one and no one knows him.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act calls for the “removal” of permanent residents of Canada who receive prison sentences of at least two years. No exceptions.

That’s why Hewitt is being banished to the country where he was born, but never really lived. Hewitt’s first big mistake, of course, was never taking out Canadian citizenship. But neither had his father, so all the kids simply went on living as if they were Canadians.

Tim played a little hockey, officiated high school and university basketball, married, had a son, bought a house. He even had a steady job for 20 years at CP Rail. And then, in his early 40s, Tim’s life went off those tracks that were supposed to carry him happily into retirement.

He lost it all.

How can that happen?

We’ll get to that.

But on Monday, Hewitt’s lawyer, David Matas, wrote the Canada Border Services Agency noting a new application had been made to keep Hewitt here.

This time on humanitarian grounds.

Matas requested that removal be deferred until the application is decided. Two days earlier, Hewitt himself had made a personal appeal of a different kind. He sent me an email detailing his story. The more detail he offered, the more complicated, pitiful and yet predictable the story got.

“In 2001,” he wrote, “I started dabbling in the cocaine world that led to a couple of binges that exhausted our bank account. My wife warned me it better not happen again or she and our son would be gone. I did it again and they were gone. The trip to the ‘bottom’ continued when my cocaine use elevated to crack. I had lost my job, the house and my family, but that didn’t stop me. My pursuit of the drug escalated to the point that I committed criminal acts to support my habit.”

The criminal acts were a series of robberies that landed Hewitt in the Stony Mountain pen and later Rockwood.

That was the first time.

He only avoided deportation when he got out in 2006 because a federal judge overturned the government’s removal order.

That should have been one of those huge life lessons.

But Hewitt hadn’t fixed whatever pothole in his personality had led to his addiction. And the crack he’d used to try and fill it with was still out there, waiting for him to trip over it. Which he did when he got out, or at least halfway out.

In November 2006 he committed six more robberies to pay for his addiction.

Back in prison, he’s spent three years in therapy and chaired the Rockwood Narcotics Anonymous group.

Then, last weekend and anticipating his deportation, Hewitt was granted a temporary pass so he could say goodbye to 30 family members.

“It felt like a living funeral as I know I can never come back ‘home.’ “

Hewitt went on to apologize for what he did and to say goodbye to the friends he grew up with.

“Every memory I have is here in Canada.”

 

— — —

On Wednesday, a spokesman at the Canada Border Services Agency all but ended Tim Hewitt’s hope.

“Finally,” the spokesman’s email concluded, “filing an application for leave and judicial review on humanitarian and compassionate grounds does not stay or delay a removal.”

It’s all quite by the book, of course, which is the problem. A law that was meant to make it easier to remove people who have arrived relatively recently and committed a serious crime makes no room for cases like Hewitt’s.

Mind you, there is one last hope.

The public safety minister could intervene.

His name is Vic Toews.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca