Kneecap have announced legal action against MP Vince Gasparro
Back in September, Gasparro incorrectly announced that the Irish hip hop group were banned from entering Canada
Last September, Member of Parliament for Eglinton-Lawrence Vince Gasparro posted a video to social media claiming that Irish hip hop group Kneecap had been deemed “ineligible” to enter Canada ahead of scheduled tour dates in Toronto and Vancouver.
Kneecap is vocally pro-Palestine, and Gasparro claimed that this somehow meant they glorified terrorism. He said he was speaking on behalf of the Canadian government and delivering an official announcement.
The trio posted an online statement in response to Gasparro, telling him, “Your comments about us are wholly untrue and deeply malicious. We will not accept it.”
Related: Denied entry to Canada, this popular band plans to sue a Toronto MP
In a bizarre turn, it was revealed that the government actually didn’t ban Kneecap from entering Canada. “He either lied or he has no clue how it works. And I find it hard to believe that he has no clue how it works,” Conservative deputy leader and Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman told Global News.
This week, as reported by the BBC, the Prime Minister’s office confirmed they were “not involved in the decision” leading to Gasparro’s rogue announcement, and the Canada Border Services Agency also said it was not “implicated in the authorisation of the announcement.”
In a message posted to Instagram today, Kneecap shared that they would now be taking legal action against Gasparro, as promised last fall. “As we said, we will be relentless in defending ourselves against outrageous and baseless accusations,” said the post.
According to the BBC, the reason Kneecap have not been permitted to enter Canada relates to a documentation compliance matter. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration told the BBC that one of the group’s members, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, had his “electronic travel authorization cancelled for inadmissibility for omitting to disclose complete and accurate information on his application.” He is allowed to submit a new application to resolve the compliance issue. A terror charge against him for displaying a Hezbollah flag at a concert was thrown out in late September.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
