CAUT joined civil liberty groups across Canada last month in objecting to the Harper government’s decision to bar British MP George Galloway from entering Canada.

CAUT president Penni Stewart and executive director James Turk say in a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that banning Galloway “amounts to nothing less than censorship of your government’s critics — a tactic you yourself have opposed in dictatorships like Iran.”

The letter reminded Harper that the United States admitted Galloway, and expressed shame “that our government is following the approach to foreign critics that characterized George W. Bush’s presidency, which the American people have soundly rejected.”

In the U.S., the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, among dozens of leading academic, free speech and civil rights organizations in the U.S. have called on the Obama administration to end the previous government’s practice of refusing visas to foreign academics, writers, artists and activists on the basis of their political views and associations.

Writing to Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, the groups point out that “ideological exclusion compromises the vitality of academic and political debate.”

“While the government plainly has an interest in excluding foreign nationals who present a threat to national security, no legitimate interest is served by the exclusion of foreign nationals on ideological grounds,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Ideological exclusion is a petty and misguided practice that the Obama administration should retire immediately.”

The Bush administration barred dozens of prominent intellectuals from assuming teaching posts at U.S. universities, fulfilling speaking engagements with U.S. audiences and attending academic conferences.

The letter calls on the government to revisit several Bush-era cases, including that of Adam Habib, a South African political commentator, prominent human rights activist and public intellectual. Although Habib earned his PhD in the U.S., he has been denied entry to attend professional meetings on terrorism-related grounds. U.S. authorities have yet to reveal, however, any legal or factual basis for the decision. Evidence strongly suggests Habib’s political activism is behind the decision and not the existence of any connection to terrorism.

The case of Swiss national and Oxford University professor Tariq Ramadan is noted as well. Ramadan, described by Time magazine as “the leading Islamic thinker among Europe’s second — and third — generation Muslim immigrants,” was accused of having endorsed terrorism when his visa was revoked just days before he was to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame. After U.S. groups filed a lawsuit, the government abandoned its claim, but it continues to exclude him. Again, evidence strongly suggests he’s barred because of his vocal criticism of U.S. foreign policy.