The Fight Against Terror and For Civil Liberties

Details: Published on Friday, 27 February 2015 17:22; Written by editor

Notice: You are invited to attend a public consultation on Bill C-51 with MPs Randall Garrison and Murray Rankin, UVic Professor Laurel Collins, and academic expert in constitutional law and privacy issues Reg Whitaker. Friday February 27, 2015 at 7-8:30pm First Metropolitan United Church.

It is with a genuine sense of disappointment that I rose this month to speak against Bill C-51, the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015. This is a very significant bill that will dismantle the privacy rights of all Canadians in the name of threats to national security. It is a bill that contains definitions so broad and so far-reaching that it risks lumping together legitimate dissent with terrorism. It is dangerously vague, and most likely ineffective in confronting the threats we face. This is a bill that still lacks any direct link to the actual events we faced in October or the ongoing terrorist threats we face today.

The government has rushed ahead with this bill without waiting for full reports on the October incidents. How can we pass a bill without understanding the events the Conservatives are using to justify it? When the Prime Minister was asked whether this bill would have prevented either of the October events, he had to say that he was not sure.

New Democrats have repeatedly asked the government to explain what some of the broad wording in this bill would cover and what specific new security actions will be authorized by this bill, all to no avail. The response more often than not has consisted of reciting general talking points about the severity of the threats we face, in a clear attempt to use fear to marshal support for this bill.

When passed, this bill would only prohibit CSIS from killing or causing bodily harm, violating the sexual integrity of an individual, or obstructing justice. This bill would authorize CSIS to do things like shut down someone's Internet service, maybe shut off someone's phone service, or conduct surveillance on private conversations carried out in public places. It also appears this bill might allow CSIS delete your facebook posts without your consent or notification.

There are a number of significant changes in the bill the government is proposing. I would start with part 1 of the bill, titled “Security of Canada Information Sharing Act”. I believe that this part of the bill would have the largest potential impacts for all Canadians. This section of the bill would allow all federal departments and agencies to share information that may be relevant to national security with Canadian intelligence and law enforcement agencies. New Democrats agree that government departments and agencies should be able to share information about real threats to public safety, but it must be done with appropriate safeguards that do not catch innocent Canadians in the net.

A second aspect of this bill with very broad implications is the section granting new powers to CSIS. These are powers that would change the nature of CSIS as an organization, moving it from being an intelligence gathering agency to an active arm of the government in opposing threats to security and to the economy, infrastructure, and a wide list of other activities. This raises the question of whether the government would be able to use CSIS for political purposes, a large concern for any organization which operates in secret.

CSIS would not require a warrant for any and all disruption activities, only those that CSIS itself judged might involve illegal or unconstitutional activities. Once a judge issues a warrant, the judge would have no further oversight role over what CSIS did with that warrant. Furthermore, this bill proposes to lower the threshold required for a judge to authorize preventative detention from reasonable grounds that a terrorist activity “will” be carried out to “may” be carried out. The RCMP would now need to suspect only that a terrorist activity might happen, instead of the previous grounds that there was some certainty that the person would commit a terrorist act. One lawyer described to me that what we had in the previous preventative detention was the lowest possible evidentiary standard, and now we are lowering that.

We also need to remember the historical record of Canada on detention in times of crisis. Japanese Canadians were interned on the west coast despite the lack of any evidence at the time, or thereafter, of a single Japanese Canadian aiding the enemy in World War II. Ukrainian Canadians were similarly interned. At the time of the FLQ crisis in Quebec, hundreds of Quebeckers were arrested and detained without charge, and no one detained was ever charged with, let alone convicted of, a criminal offence.

Today, this bill will clearly have an impact on Muslim Canadians, First Nations activists, and on those concerned with climate change and other environmental issues. This is clear when read in concert with the RCMP's 44-page memo on so-called anti-petroleum activists, a memo that, just as this bill does, tends to lump together both legitimate dissent and extremist and violent activities.

It is not only New Democrats and civil liberty groups that have reservations about this bill and New Democrats have fought hard to make sure those voices are heard in committee hearings. These opponents include 4 former Prime Ministers, 5 former Supreme Court Judges, 3 former Ministers of Justice, 4 former Public Safety Ministers, 3 former Security Intelligence Review Committee Members, and a former UN Human Rights Commissioner. It also includes former NDP leader Ed Broadband, and former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow. The Privacy Commissioner has expressed concerns that this bill would allow the information of many law-abiding Canadians to be collected and shared with a long list of other government agencies and used for purposes other than those for which it was collected. This would clearly undermine a fundamental principle of our privacy rights when it comes to the government's use of our personal information. Many of the departments and agencies that would now be allowed to share information do not have adequate privacy protections in place, nor do they have any oversight mechanisms governing their information sharing activities.

New Democrats have given this bill careful consideration before coming to our decision to oppose it in principle. We have consulted broadly with groups potentially most directly affected by this bill, with legal experts, and with our constituents when we held consultations across the country. We have not taken the decision to oppose this bill lightly. We have done our due diligence before pronouncing on a bill that would make major changes to over two dozen pieces of legislation and that would potentially have major impacts on privacy rights, rights to peaceful dissent, and fundamental freedoms, like freedom from detention without charge. This is why I voted against this bill at second reading and will continue opposing it.

Warm regards,

Randall Garrison