by KEN HECHTMAN

As Bill C-18, the revised Canadian Citizenship Act, lurks in parliamentary committee limbo between second and third reading, Muslim Council of Montreal president Salam Elmenyawi is trying to drum up opposition to it outside the Muslim community. "People are shocked," he says of the reaction he's gotten over the past year from the groups he's approached, ranging from Alliance Quebec to campus ethnic clubs. "They don't believe it's possible. I have to carry a copy of the law to convince them."

According to Elmenyawi, the most shocking provision of C-18 is the one that divides Canadian citizens into three classes: First-class citizens are Canadian by birth. Their rights don't change. Second-class citizens have been naturalized for over five years - their citizenship can be revoked after a court hearing similar to the security certificate trials of Adil Charkaoui and others. Third-class citizens, those naturalized for less than five years, don't even get that - they get a written notice from the Citizenship and Immigration Minister advising them their citizenship has been revoked. "Never before has a minister had such power," says Elmenyawi.

Elmenyawi also sees a need for the civil liberties campaign to change tactics. "We lobbied hard against C-36 [the Anti-Terrorism Act], C-35 [Foreign Missions and International Organizations Act] and C-55 [the Public Safety Act] and nothing worked," he says. "We're thinking now about Supreme Court challenges. None of these laws will survive a Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge.

"There's no fundamental justice in any of the tools created by Bill C-18," he adds. "The revocation hearing will use secret evidence that the defendant and his lawyer will never see, including evidence given directly by the minister to the judge out of court. It's mistrial by statute." Normally, if a minister calls a judge, that by itself is grounds for a mistrial. In revocation hearings, as in security certificate hearings now, it'll be standard procedure.

"The judge cannot take on the role of defending the accused. He doesn't have the time or the budget or the motivation," Elmenyawi says. "The only person who can defend me is me - and to do that, I need to know what I'm accused of."

The admissibility of evidence provided by foreign governments is also cause for concern, he says. "If you're going to rely on dictatorships to tell you who the bad guys are, then everybody from Third World countries is at risk. Governments that can forge a Canadian passport can forge anything," he says, referring to operations in Jordan in 1997 and Gaza in 2002 where Israeli intelligence agents were discovered using Canadian passports. "For that matter, the United States used forged documents, the Niger uranium documents, to start [the Iraq] war. Do you think they wouldn't use them to deport somebody?"

Another problem is the lack of an appeal process. After one judge makes the decision based on hearing one side's case, the deportation will go through without further procedure. "There's no pre-removal risk assessment, no humanitarian and compassionate appeal as in other deportations," Elminyawi says. "You cannot fix one technicality and say you're being flexible. The whole thing is flawed."