Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, escorted the heads of Canada’s security agencies to Capitol Hill Thursday to try to refute allegations that Canada has become a safe haven for terrorists.

But he may have chosen the wrong day to visit.

A delegation that included the heads of CSIS, the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency and Janice Charette, Canada’s deputy minister of Citizenship and Immigration, happened to arrive as the House of Representatives was engaged in a heated debate over Iraq and the war on terror.

Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House, pointed to Canada as the best recent example that the threat of terrorism remains, as he put it, “very real.”

“Just recently our neighbour to the north, Canada, foiled a terrorist plot to storm that country’s Parliament and one of its major television headquarters,” Hastert said.  “The terrorists intended to behead those they captured…. I think we’ve got a very strong story to tell the people we’ll be meeting with.”

Wilson tried to calm the rhetoric, with mixed success. “There are some things that have been said in the media that have not been accurate so we wanted to address those head on,” he said.

But it was a tough sell in a Congressional election and coming so soon after 17 suspects were arrested in Toronto June 3 on terrorism-related charges.

After the arrests, several key congressional leaders claimed there was a large al-Qaeda presence in Canada. They complained about Canada’s lax immigration laws and what they called Canada’s porous border with the United States.