At a press conference Tuesday morning at the law offices of Bakerlaw, at Christie and Dupont streets, Mahmood and his lawyer Nicole Chrolavicius, announced they would be filing a human rights complaint against Air Canada over the country's unofficial No-Fly list.

The complaint was being lodged with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, with support from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, the Canadian Arab Federation, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations and local MP Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park).

Mahmood, a High Park area resident, is a Canadian citizen, who is also a Muslim. He and his wife were headed to a wedding in May three years ago and wanted to take a connecting Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Victoria - they had flown from Toronto to Vancouver on a Jetsgo flight and had no problems.

"In the Vancouver airport, immediately after processing our credit card payment and being reassured of the availability of seats, I was told that I would not be allowed to board the flight because my name was 'flagged' in the system," Mahmood told reporters.

Air Canada's corporate office in Montreal told their Vancouver desk staff that evening that Mahmood was not to board any Air Canada flights the following day. His wife however, Chiliean-born and non-Muslim was told she was free to board and travel onwards to Victoria.

"I was told that in the future, I would always be asked to show a Canadian passport at check-in," Mahmood said. "We ended up renting a hotel and then a car and driving to Victoria the following day just in time for the wedding."

The complaint, according to Chrolavicius, would be filed by fax and by mail. The Canadian Human Rights Commission will then decide whether to hear the complaint and follow up with an investigation.

Mahmood was shocked to find out he couldn't board that flight, especially when he provided the appropriate identification and arrived for the trip in plenty of time.

"The idea that my name was somehow 'flagged' in the security system was extremely unnerving," he said. "I am just as in the dark, with no tangible answers from Air Canada now as I was three years ago."

Mahmood says he wonders if this would have happened if he wasn't Muslim. He also has questions about how these lists are created and what he needs to do to remove himself from them.

In a letter to Nash on May 17, 2007, Air Canada did acknowledge that there was some kind of list in existence, said Chrolavicius. Nash said she met Mahmood back in 2004 and when she found out what had happened, she got in touch with Vancouver International Airport.

"They said there is a list, that there is a procedure that if a name is flagged, a supervisor must be called," Nash told The Villager.

According to Gale Paul, a privacy officer with Air Canada's Law Branch, in the letter to Nash, "Air Canada does not, and did not, practice racial profiling... Passenger bookings are automatically flagged if the name of a passenger is a close match to a name appearing on a security list."

Labels: British Columbia, Ontario, political cartooning, Quebec, real world, Shahid Mahmood, Toronto, Vancouver