Canadian senator sent ‘inauthentic’ documents to fleeing Afghan family

Marilou McPhedran, a Canadian senator, and one of her staff members sent inauthentic travel documents to a family attempting to flee Afghanistan last year, a Canadian newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The letters say each of the Afghans named on them has been “granted a VISA to enter Canada” and ask that the group be given “safe travel to the Hamid Karzai International Airport so that they can board their organized flight.”

The family is still in Afghanistan.

According to the Canadian government, the facilitation letters they received from the senator and her office were not authentic, and the people named on them had not been approved to come to Canada.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the federal immigration department, conducted an internal investigation and referred the matter to police.

Senator McPhedran said she was trying to help, and that she acted in good faith. She acknowledged using a template version of a government facilitation letter, but she denied that the documents were fake, or that she had used them in an unauthorized way.

“There is nothing fraudulent or illicit about any actions I took with regard to the Afghanistan rescue efforts last August,” she said in an email.

IRCC spokesperson Rémi Larivière said: “The use of inauthentic facilitation letters is a serious matter.” Following the department’s internal investigation, he added, it “made a referral to the appropriate law enforcement partners.”