Canadian government urged to rescue Afghan interpreters long before American withdrawal, leaked emails reveal

The Canadian government's stance has long been that no one could have possibly known how quickly the security situation would deteriorate in Afghanistan, but an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate reveals it had plenty of warning.

With the U.S. military's evacuation from Afghanistan this summer — bringing America's longest war to an end — Afghan interpreters and mission staff who had worked alongside the Canadian Armed Forces were left at the mercy of the Taliban, who considered them traitors for having assisted Western allies.

The Fifth Estate obtained more than 200 pages of documents, reports, interpreter's biographies and support letters as well as 45 leaked emails sent to Canadian cabinet ministers and their staff, well before the American pullout, making the case to rescue those Afghan nationals.

"They had so much time to act on this, and they didn't," Robert St. Aubin, who worked as a legislative assistant in the House of Commons, told The Fifth Estate. 

"And then when they did act on it, they did it in such a convoluted and complicated, untransparent and such a bureaucratic, cautious manner that it resulted in ... thousands of people being left behind."

When Canadian soldiers left Afghanistan in 2011, they left behind local Afghans — former interpreters and mission staff — who helped them navigate the country they had landed in nine years earlier.

Canada never made written commitments, but there was an understanding among interpreters and veterans that those who had risked their lives to assist Canadian efforts would be taken care of. 

In February 2019, the office of the Thunder Bay-Rainy River MP — at that time Don Rusnak — took notice of a local veteran campaigning to bring interpreters he had worked with in Kandahar to Canada and wrote to Immigration Canada on their behalf. 

The documentation was comprehensive — including letters of commendation from the Canadian Armed Forces, along with letters of intimidation from the Taliban. However, the response Rusnak's office got from the government was underwhelming.

"I don't want to say that they didn't care," St. Aubin, who was working for Rusnak, told The Fifth Estate. "But it was that they didn't seem all that interested, right? It just seemed like another immigration case to them."

In the 2019 federal election, Marcus Powlowski, a medical doctor from Thunder Bay, won the Thunder Bay-Rainy River seat for the Liberals and the interpreters' file landed on his desk. He continued reaching out to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on their behalf.

"You'd think that a person who's essentially a war hero — an interpreter who essentially is a veteran himself — you'd think he'd be given some help," said St. Aubin, who then started working for Polowski. "There was nothing. Absolutely nothing."

The exchanges between Powlowski's office and the immigration minister at the time, Marco Mendicino, began in February 2020 and went on for months, without any apparent result.

Powlowski told The Fifth Estate it wouldn't be politically wise for him to discuss his emails.