No word on why. I wonder if his membership in a violent terrorist group had something to do with it.

“I don’t know why I was turned back,” Ayers said in an interview this morning from Chicago. “I got off the plane like everyone else and I was asked to come over to the other side. The border guards reviewed some stuff and said I wasn’t going to be allowed into Canada. To me it seems quite bureaucratic and not at all interesting … If it were me I would have let me in. I couldn’t possibly be a threat to Canada.”…

[Jeffrey Kugler, executive director of the Centre for Urban Schooling,] waited for five hours at the Toronto Island airport for Ayers. He was with a lawyer, but the border guard refused to allow Ayers to see the lawyer.

“The entire four or five hours he was not allowed to have representation at all. To me this is an issue of academic freedom. He could not be a threat to anyone ever. Anyone who knows anything about this man – he’s a distinguished scholar at the University of Illinois and he has been involved in education reform over the past 15 years. To imagine in any way he was a threat to Canada is really absurd.”

What’s he doing in Toronto the day before the inauguration, anyway? Surely this respected educator, community activist, and pillar of liberal Chicago society is someone Barack Obama would want front and center for his big moment. Kindly Reverend Wright is in town, in fact, although there’s no word yet on whether he’ll be at the festivities or confined to the basement the way he was when this train first got rolling two years ago. Exit quotation: “[C]ivilian Palestinians … are systematically stamped out by a military machine second to none.”