THREE years ago, the Canadian government significantly changed course in the pursuit of alleged Nazi war criminals living in this country.  Today, we are starting to see the controversial results of that altered route.

In the letters pages of this newspaper over the past couple of weeks, the consequences have been detailed and debated.  Olya Odynsky, daughter of an accused Nazi war criminal, wrote of her family's distress over Canada's handling of her father's case.  Here, she wrote, was a man who came to Canada almost 50 years ago, who built a life and a standing in the Ukrainian-Canadian community.  Now he's been slapped with a revocation of citizenship and a deportation order.  Why?  Because Canada has deemed that he falsified his wartime past to gain entry to this country in 1948.

Mr. Odynsky is indeed one of 14 people that the Canadian government is pursuing in its new course of deporting, rather than prosecuting war criminals.  Back in 1986, when Mr. Justice Jules Deschenes issued his royal commission report on war criminals, he recommended a "made-in-Canada" solution, by which the alleged Nazis would be tried and punished here.  However, by 1995, with a long list of false starts and failures behind it, Canada was forced to choose a "made-in the USA" solution � deporting, rather than prosecuting people who are alleged to have committed Nazi war crimes.

And now, as if to seal that American influence on Canada's policy in this regard, the Justice Department has hired Neil Sher, former director of war-crimes investigations in the United States, as a special consultant.  Mr. Sher, whose office has overseen more than 60 citizenship revocations in the United States since 1979, will be taking up his Canadian consulting duties in the coming weeks.

This much can be said in theory about the U.S.-style approach: it's more successful.  It's also easier.  Deportation is a civil matter, where prosecution would be criminal.  There's a huge difference, in terms of investigation time and resources, between proving that someone lied on immigration documents and that someone took part in Second World War atrocities.

But it's an easy solution with an uneasy feel to it.  Singling out certain individuals for a retrospective look at their immigration documents, based on information that cannot prevail in a criminal court, has the whiff of selective enforcement of our laws.  This is, to be fair, something that Canadians tolerate in income-tax audits, as just one example.  And Canada can appropriately claim that the Holocaust crimes � and their victims � deserve a special, selective effort to ferret out war criminals in our midst.  But efforts must be made to ensure that tight immigration criteria are not being applied retrospectively.  A central question of these deportation hearings will revolve around lies of omission and lies of commission in these immigration documents.  In other words, did anyone ask these men what they did in the war?

There is also the question of proportion between the alleged crime and the punishment.  It can and will be argued that someone who lies on an immigration document has no real claim to the citizenship that is later revoked.  In other words, if you didn't get it legally, you didn't get it at all.  But citizenship, as we know, is built on stronger foundations than a signature on a form.  Leave aside the question of whether the falsification revolved around a dubious past: is banishment an appropriate penalty for a 50-year-old lie?

To even ask these questions is to risk accusations about trivializing Nazi war crimes or war criminals in general.  But our laws and our attempts to keep fairness at the heart of justice were central to this country's fight in the Second World War.  If these issues aren't raised in open debate, it will be that battle that is trivialized.