Being a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that was outlawed in China in 1999, 30-year-old Wang says he would have faced certain arrest and possible torture at the hands of the Chinese authorities had he been sent back.
Peter Van Loan, Minister of Public Safety, intervened in the case after his office received numerous letters and phone calls appealing for Wang to remain in Canada.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney also played a key role, working closely with the Falun Dafa Association of Canada (FDAC) to verify Wang’s bone fides and remaining in constant communication with Van Loan’s office.
Kenney’s spokesperson Alykhan Velshi says following Kenney’s personal intervention, Wang was given a temporary resident permit for two years along with a work permit, enabling him to apply for permanent residency from within Canada.
This all came about and the stay was achieved during the considerable political turmoil that has embroiled Ottawa in recent weeks.
“I thank Minister Jason Kenny and Minister Van Loan, who at the crucial moment gave me special permission to stay,” says an appreciative Wang. “It’s very important. If I was sent back to China I cannot imagine how severe the persecution would be.”
New Democrat Olivia Chow, Wang’s MP, sent a letter pleading his case, as did Liberal MP Yasmin Ratansi and Amnesty International Toronto.
In a similar case in 2005, Falun Gong practitioner Jiang Renzheng and his family were sent back to China from Germany because the German refugee board did not consider them to be at risk. One month after arriving in China, Jiang was sentenced to three years of forced labour, leaving his wife and two young children behind.
Wang’s deportation crisis arose after Wang, nervous and unfamiliar with Canada’s administrative and judicial systems, made several errors during his refugee application. Feeling pressured and worried, Wang says he also guessed answers to questions to which he did not know the answer.
The result was the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) did not believe he was a genuine Falun Gong practitioner facing threat in his home country.
Many Chinese people, wishing to immigrate to Canada, claim to be Falun Gong practitioners, which poses a challenge for the IRB. In Wang’s case, FDAC vouched for him, something the organization is very careful about doing.
A sales representative with The Epoch Times in Toronto, Wang says he found a “deep sense of peace” in the teachings of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, the tenets of Falun Gong, after he took up the practice in China in1997.
Wang was an economics student in his fourth year at Shandong Economics University in Shandong Province when the Chinese regime launched its crackdown on Falun Gong in July 1999. Tens of thousands of practitioners were rounded up and detained, many ending up in labour camps and brainwashing centres where they were tortured to force them give up the practice.
Wang escaped jail, but he was held prisoner at his university for two weeks where he was threatened by the university authorities that they would turn him over to the Public Security Bureau which would have exposed him to even more severe punishment.
“They forced me to renounce my beliefs and brainwashed me,” says Wang. “They asked my mother to come to the university from another city to pressure me, along with all my family members.”
Believing his career, family and personal safety were endangered, against his will Wang agreed to give up Falun Gong.
Although he continued practicing secretly for a period of time, the constant pressure led him to quit completely in 2000. This caused him great mental torment, he says, as he felt he had betrayed his conscience and his most deeply held beliefs.
Having “completely lost confidence” in the Chinese regime, Wang moved to Canada in 2003 as a graduate student. He soon began practicing Falun Gong again.
“Canada is completely different,” he says. “The people and the government support Falun Gong, so the environment is totally different. The Canadian government supports freedom of belief.”
FDAC spokesperson Lucy Zhou says that while a number of Chinese who apply for refugee status pretend to be Falun Gong practitioners, only those FDAC determines to be genuine practitioners will be given assistance by the association.
“There are so many places in the process that some genuine practitioners’ cases can fall through the cracks because of poor communication or whatever,” she says. “But we’re glad the government recognizes that there is a persecution in China and that practitioners face danger there — this is much appreciated.”
MPs of all stripes have been instrumental over the years in helping Falun Gong practitioners avoid deportation. Conservative MP Stockwell Day, while Minister of Public Safety, intervened to stop the deportation last March of Bing Gu, also just one day before Gu was scheduled to be sent back to China.
Back in 2001, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler helped free Professor Kunlun Zhang from detention in China. A Canadian citizen, Zhang was arrested and subjected to torture and brainwashing while on a visit to China. As Zhang’s legal counsel, Cotler communicated with many MPs and then-foreign Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy about the case and won extensive support.
Cotler was also instrumental in securing the release of practitioners Ying Zhu and Shenli Lin. During Axworthy’s tenure as foreign affairs minister, Canada was the first country in the world that condemned the persecution of Falun Gong.
In October 2002, a Falun Gong motion introduced by Conservative MP Scott Reid received all-party support and passed unanimously in the House of Commons — a rare achievement for a private member’s motion.
The motion called on Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister at the time, to address with then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin the issue of 13 Falun Gong practitioners with Canadian family ties unlawfully detained in China. It resulted in the release of eight practitioners within a year.
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