Local News - It’s time the federal immigration minister did something about the plight of Lucy Lu, a furious Peter Kormos said yesterday.
“Can we purchase some gonads for Mr. Coderre?” the New Democrat MPP stormed during a meeting with Lu yesterday.
There’s a growing trend among government ministers to hide behind their bureaucracies and refuse to make tough decisions, said Kormos, a 12-year member of the provincial legislature. “The trend for cabinet ministers is to not have sufficient courage to utilize the discretionary powers the law allows,” he said.
Immigration Minister Denis Coderre declined to comment on the Lu case yesterday. Spokeswoman Nicole Beauchamp wouldn’t provide a reason for the government’s refusal to overturn Lu’s deportation order. “The minister does not comment on individual cases,” Beauchamp said.

Lu has been living in Calvary Bible Church for 15 months, avoiding a deportation order. Kormos, a former criminal lawyer, says Canadians need to turn their outrage up a notch and let the federal government know its treatment of Lu is unacceptable. “This is not the kind of treatment Canadians expect other Canadians to get from their own government,” Kormos assured Lu.
The provincial NDP caucus has joined Canada’s 2.5 million-member labour movement, churches, nonprofit organizations and the Kingston community in urging the federal government to overturn the deportation order that led Lu, 44, to take sanctuary in Calvary Bible Church in November 2000.
Yesterday, Kormos grilled Lu for details about how she was persuaded to plead guilty to manslaughter in the 1985 bludgeoning death of her first husband, the crime for which she is being deported. He condemned the lawyer who told Lu’s interpreter to talk her into a guilty plea, and the courts that allowed the plea to stand despite what he called the “plethora of evidence” that pointed to her innocence. The fact that Lu’s interpreter was unable to translate fully her first and second trials – which ended in a hung jury and a mistrial, respectively – and that the plea bargain was worked out with an interpreter, who then explained it to Lu, was a gross miscarriage of justice, Kormos said.

Lu was told that if she pleaded guilty to manslaughter, she would serve a short time in prison and then be allowed to live a normal life.
She said she didn’t understand that a guilty plea would make her ineligible for Canadian citizenship. “What she describes is the most egregious breach of confidence that could ever occur,” Kormos said. “That is the real crime.”

Immigration officials maintain that Lu’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant. They argue that the guilty plea was in effect at the time the deportation order was issued and that it isn’t their job to consider her claims of innocence. Wrong, Kormos said. “The fact that a person may have inappropriately pled guilty … should be a primary consideration in assessing the impact of a decision and in deciding if you exercise ministerial discretion.”
Coderre and Prime Minister Jean Chretien have authority to sign an immigration permit at will. Former Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan refused to do so, despite tens of thousands of letters, petitions and postcards sent on Lu’s behalf.
“I’d like to think that as a thinking and responsible MP, I wouldn’t need 60,000 letters and petitions to tell me what’s the right thing to do,” Kormos said yesterday.

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