Q: The hajj is a difficult journey for most Muslims, both physically and spiritually. What compelled you to document yours?

A: The purpose of this film is to mount an open challenge to the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. For me, it’s not a film about Islam and homosexuality. I’ve done that before.

I think the export of Wahhabism has been the biggest Saudi project for the last century, and they have transferred it to every corner of the Muslim world. Communities have become increasingly conservative. The horrific ideology of ISIS and Al Qaeda would not exist without the Saudi Wahhabi doctrine. This is what they’re teaching children in schools. This is at the root of all the problems in the Muslim world, in my humble opinion.

Q: Your film features footage that someone else sent you of a man being executed by Saudi authorities allegedly for being homosexual. It’s a type of horror we associate with terror groups. Was outing this type of barbarism your point?

A: Yes. It’s ridiculous that in the 21st century, they’re allowed to carry out beheadings on a routine basis. It’s amazing the rest of the world does not say anything.

Q: You’d already openly identified yourself as gay in your previous documentary, yet the Saudi government granted you a visa to enter the kingdom for hajj.

A: I never thought the Saudis would give me a visa. As you learn in the film, I go on the hajj with a Shia group, which I do deliberately [to conceal my identity], even though I’m Sunni.

I think I slipped through the cracks because they were issuing millions of visas at the time. If they had been looking, it wouldn’t have been hard for the Saudis to know who I am.

Q: Most Muslims learn early on that the hajj is at the heart of affirming your faith. Did you feel conflicted since it was a religious journey, but you were also making a film?

A: For me, it’s the toughest journey I’ve taken in my entire life. It’s clear I’m going as a pilgrim, but there’s also the filmmaker half of my brain telling me there’s no way you’re not going to document the most important journey of your life.

Q: Your religious self wonders if you’re doing the right thing. Does it take away from being completely devout if you are also constantly filming? I had to deal with that conflict.

I felt I came out much stronger from the experience and that I made the hajj for thousands of gay Muslims who are probably too afraid to go. It was an enormous task to take on, but I came out the other end a better Muslim.

Q: Some might assume you’d come out of a journey through this very conservative region, and its strain of Islam, denouncing your religion.

A: Islam may have turned its back on me, but Islam is also who I am. It’s very hard to cut off your right hand and say I’ll only function with my left hand from now on.

Faith sits together with every part of my being, and I don’t know any other way to be than Muslim.

Q: “A Sinner in Mecca” documents the good — the powerful experience of being at the Grand Mosque and actually touching the Kaaba — and the bad, which is the dictates of Wahhabism, the commercialization of hajj and the class system that exists, even during the pilgrimage.

A: It’s a complex experience. I needed to be very honest with what is good and bad. I’m in the business of truth-telling.

There have been a couple of films the Saudis have commissioned about the hajj. I call them junket films because the reporters were chosen by them and led by Saudi minders from the Information Ministry.

Although rarely spoken of, the irony that Germany, with its Nazi past, should be the most welcoming of any nation in today’s refugee crisis, is not lost on those with any knowledge of the era, which is just about everybody. Canada has its own stain from that dreadful period, the turning away of the Jewish refugee ship MS St. Louis in 1939. While there are many memories of prime minister MacKenzie King, that stain will remain forever on his reputation.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper would do well to remember this in the current Syrian refugee turmoil. This is his moment to shine, and it is slipping away fast. Conservative Party followers may be split on this issue, but then Conservative Party voters always are, no matter what the issue. Mr. Harper has done well to hold the Conservative factions together for the past decade, but the coalition, which began to unravel shortly after the last election, is disintegrating at an accelerating rate, with the remnants of the old Red Tories becoming more vocal on the moral crisis the government faces.

It is beyond time for Mr. Harper to recognize that every leader faces an unexpected moral choice that sometimes seems to come out of nowhere – and this is his. The fact that he is in the election campaign of his life makes his situation more difficult, but does not make the choice less compelling. He surely does not want to go into history, whenever that may be, with the heartrending picture of a tragically drowned toddler at the top of his file. And it may well dominate, no matter what his accomplishments in government have been, unless he can find a way to navigate the flood of sympathy now rightly being expressed by Canadians from all walks of life, including many Conservatives. Canadians are looking for a leader to lead – to express the sympathetic outpouring of Canadians and act upon them.

However, the method costs money, travel, and time, prompting some to argue the rules have effectively made their right to vote subject to financial ability.

“Voting should not be something you must purchase,” said Natalie Chabot Roy, 38, who was raised in northern Ontario but lives in Bonney Lake, Wash.

Earlier this year, the government successfully appealed a court ruling that would have allowed Canadians abroad for more than five years to keep on voting by way of a mailed “special ballot”.

Nevertheless, at least one enterprising expat has already cast his ballot for the Oct. 19 election under another section of the Canada Elections Act that amounts to a barely accessible backdoor around the ban, and others are considering following suit.

That section allows expats who show up in the riding in which they lived before leaving Canada to vote — if they show proof of the former residency along with accepted identification.

….Last week, Elections Canada finally updated its website to confirm the little-known voting information, even though spokesman, John Enright, said it was “not a new position.”

The law barring long-term expats from voting has been on the books since 1993, but it was only in 2008 that Elections Canada began enforcing the rules, catching some Canadians abroad by surprise.

One was former Montrealer Nicolas Duchastel de Montrouge, 43, who went to the U.S. in 2000 for work and now lives in suburban Seattle. The ballot refusal in 2011 prompted him to delve into the rules, where he discovered what he called the “loophole.”

In a letter to the self-described political junkie last month, a senior Elections Canada official confirmed his right to vote — if he could show up in Hull, Que. — where he was “ordinarily resident”, before leaving Canada.