Time To Take On Bill C-51

 
David Christopher, over at rabble.ca, writes:

After all, Bill C-51 represents one of the most dangerous assaults on Canadians' basic rights that this country has ever seen. It turns the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) into what The Globe and Mail described as a "secret police force," with little oversight or accountability. It opens the door for violations of our Charter Rights, including, as Margaret Atwood and over 450 artists and creators have warned, our right to free speech and free expression. And it empowers spy agencies to conduct dragnet surveillance and information sharing on innocent citizens, prompting strong criticism from the Privacy Commissioner that all Canadians will be "caught in this web."

It's clear, too, that spy agencies are already exploiting the sweeping new powers bestowed upon them by Bill C-51. As Jim Bronskill of the Canadian Press wrote earlier this year, at least four federal agencies, including CSIS, are already using the legislation to gain access to Canadians' private information. And CSIS head Michel Coulombe recently told parliamentarians that his agency has already used C-51's extraordinary "disruption" powers over two dozen times without seeking judicial approval.

It's long past time, he writes, to make changes. Lawrence Martin, in today's Globe and Mail, thinks that there will be few changes made to the legislation:

The Liberals don’t want to do anything until the U.S. election is over. If Donald Trump becomes president (a doubtful prospect), all hell breaks lose. Security policy, border policy, immigration policy south of the border would be overhauled. Ottawa would have to respond in a manner considerably different than it would if Hillary Clinton wins the Nov. 8 vote.

And, with the rising tide of terrorist attacks around the world, people are scared:

Justin Trudeau did not want to be seen as being soft on terror when the Harper government brought in C-51, which was in response to consecutive terror incidents on domestic soil. The Liberals backed the bill and sought cover with the promise of amendments. But given the climate of the times, given the recent spate of terrorist atrocities, they now feel a new need to be cautious.

Christopher assesses the public mood differently:

Against this backdrop, it's no wonder that Canadians are growing impatient at the lack of action from the government to date. Writing in iPolitics, columnist Michael Harris points out that the Liberals promised last October that C-51 would be "overhauled without delay," and calls on "Team Trudeau to get going on the hearings." Amnesty International's Alex Neve is also keen to get moving, telling Ottawa Citizen readers that "as long as C-51 remains untouched, so too do its many human rights shortcomings."

The public consultation process is the last, best chance to change the bill. Except, to date, that process is moribund. And the clock is ticking. It's time to take on Bill C-51.

Image: ottawasun.com

Pierre Would Be Appalled

Sometimes silence isn't golden. June 21st marked the anniversary of the passage of Bill C-51. When Justin Trudeau's party voted to pass the bill, they did so saying they would change it substantially once they were elected. Michael Harris writes:

C-51 handed Canada’s spy service grotesque new powers that are unconstitutional, indefensible and unnecessary. Short of killing or sexually assaulting ‘persons of interest’ in its quest to disrupt activities deemed to be ‘dangerous’ to national security, CSIS was handed carte blanche by the Harper government. Not a good situation when, at the time, Canada — unlike the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand — had no parliamentary oversight of the activities of the country’s spies.

 As far as civilian oversight went, Harper starved the Security and Intelligence Review Committee of funding and never even bothered to fill a vacancy (the committee only has five members to begin with). Harper didn’t want oversight — he wanted a rubber stamp and zombie appointees. And if Arthur Porter hadn’t been accused in a kickback scheme in a Montreal hospital project, Harper’s personal choice to head up SIRC would have continued his oversight of SIRC. (As it happened, he died a fugitive from Canadian justice in a Panamanian jail.)

More importantly, the bill bore the marks of the Harperites' utter contempt for the Charter of Rights and  Freedoms:

Basic civil rights went on the chopping block when the bill received Royal Assent in June 2015. The spy service could infringe on free speech because “promoting” terrorism was now a jailing offence. CSIS could make more arrests without warrants, even in cases where all the authorities had was the suspicion that an individual “may” carry out a terrorist act. The spy agency was no longer restricted to simply gathering intelligence, but now had the power to “disrupt” suspected terror plots. CSIS could even siphon personal information about an individual from 100 government departments, including the Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada. And if the spooks planned to break the law or violate the Constitution, they could go before a judge in secret to get pre-approval of their illegal acts.

The Liberals said that they would hold public meetings to get input on how the bill should be changed.  So far there have been no meetings.

Pierre Trudeau would be appalled.

Image: huffingtonpost.ca

Let's Hope They Understand That

 The Trudeau government has vowed to "fix" Bill C-51 -- the bill which the Harper government claimed guaranteed Canadians national security. But that guarantee came with a price: the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Communications Security Establishment were allowed to operate outside the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In January, Ralph Goodale and David McGuinty headed to Britain to ask for advice about how to fix the bill. But, Michael Harris writes, if they were looking for best practices, Britain -- under David Cameron's government -- was not the place to go:

This week the Cameron government published its draft version of the Investigatory Powers Bill. It is Britain’s answer to the Apple-versus-the-FBI battle in the United States, where a controversy is raging over privacy issues and the government’s authority to breach the confidentiality of information contained on devices like iPhones.

The Cameron government’s answer is both draconian and Orwellian, which may explain why 200 senior lawyers have written that the legislation breaches international law and is “unfit” for the its purpose. Why? It utterly destroys any known concept of privacy, and worse, it moves the power to breach that privacy from the judiciary to the government. It is, in plain language, the Big Brother Charter.

Here’s the price in the UK of folding on the privacy issue. The government would require that internet service providers retain data on their customers, such as browsing records, for twelve months in the event that intelligence agencies decide they need it. According to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, all of whom oppose the legislation, such legislation would also usher in an era of bulk surveillance, less effective encryption, and circumstances in which the companies would have to hack their own customers.

Harris argues that Canadians are not prepared for bulk surveillance and they will not accept it. Let's hope Mr. Goodale, Mr. McGunity -- and Mr. Trudeau -- understand that.

Hedges On Bill C-51

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Back in March, Chris Hedges planned to address a demonstration on Bill C-51. However, his plane was delayed getting into Toronto, so the crowd never heard what he had to say. Nonetheless, his speech has been made available at rabble.ca. It's  well worth reading. The corporate state has won, he writes, and it's up to us to do something about it:

There are no internal constraints left to halt totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics is a sham. The media is subservient to corporate power. The working class is being disempowered and impoverished. The legal system is a subsidiary of the corporate state. Any form of dissent, no matter how tepid, will soon to be blocked by an internal security apparatus empowered by anti-terrorist laws that will outstrip anything dreamed of by the East German Stasi state. And no one in Ottawa or Washington intends to help us. Opposition parties, such as the Democratic Party, may cry foul when out of power, but once in power they bow to the demands of the omnipotent military and security organs that serve our corporate masters.

Any state that has the ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state. It does not matter if it does not use this capacity today. It will use it, history has shown, should it feel threatened or seek greater control. The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt wrote, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, "but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population." No one who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere at any time, whose conversations, messages, meetings, proclivities and habits are recorded, stored and analyzed, as ours are, can be described as free. The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked, and those who watch and track them, is the relationship between masters and slaves.

There will, if this law is not blocked, be no checks left on state power. State Security will operate outside the law. Citizens will be convicted on secret evidence in secret courts. Citizens will be subject to arbitrary searches and arrests. Due process will be eradicated. Internal security organs will serve as judge, jury and executioner. The outward forms of democratic participation -- voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation -- will remain, but become meaningless forms of political theater.

Once the security services become omnipotent those who challenge the abuses of power, those who expose the crimes carried out by government are treated as criminals. Totalitarian states always invert the moral order. The evil rule. The righteous are condemned.

Try to defend the treaty rights of First Nations people and you will go to prison. Try to halt the tar sands, fracking, or the bitumen-carrying pipelines and you will go to prison. Try to oppose Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and you will go to prison. And once you are seized by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service you can be subjected to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, the disorienting poles of extreme light and darkness or extreme heat and extreme cold, along with stress-position torture, waterboarding, beatings and pressure-point torture. And it will all be legal.

The only option we have, writes Hedges, is to rebel -- as Albert Camus defined the term:

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed -- the unemployed and underemployed workers, the people of the First Nations whose land and lives are being exploited, Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them means a refusal to collaborate with political systems that mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

Something to think about before casting your vote in the next election.

Could He Have Been Wrong?

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Bill C- 51 was supposed to have been Stephen Harper's trump card. If the economy went south, he could scare voters into supporting him. It worked a couple of elections ago, when he claimed that coalition governments were for losers.

But Mr Harper's gift for political poker seems to be failing. Steve Sullivan writes:

It’s remarkable to recall how, only months ago, many members of the pundit class were calling the security issue Harper’s ace in the hole — a policy area where he had a clear position and a solid advantage over the New Democrats and Liberals. But the timing worked against him: Terrorism gave him a polling bump that lasted just long enough for too many people to learn just enough about C-51 to loathe it.

Now, and quite suddenly, the bill is a political problem. This week we saw something astounding: a group of right-leaning critics of the bill — including National Firearms Association president Sheldon Clare and National Post comment editor Jesse Kline — calling the information-sharing provisions in C-51 “the long gun registry on steroids” and warning of a split in the Conservative party’s own voter base.

The Conservative base -- which Harper has courted assiduously -- doesn't  like the bill. Now the base is rebelling. They write in an open letter:

“Bill C-51 represents everything that principled conservatives have been fighting against for the past decade,” reads a letter signed by the critics and posted on the website StopC51. “It is appalling that a Conservative government would even consider voting for such legislation, much less crafting it and pushing it into law.”

The letter goes on to excoriate C-51’s provisions for “secret trials” and online censorship, to accuse Harper of rank hypocrisy for pushing C-51 after having damned the long-gun registry and the long-form census as unacceptable intrusions into Canadians’ privacy, and to state the bill violates basic small-c conservative principles by extending the reach of Canada’s security services into an extralegal grey zone. It warns that C-51 risks depressing the Conservative core vote and allowing the New Democrats or Liberals to come up the middle.

“On balance, there is no need for C-51,” it reads, “and it is politically foolish to bring in such legislation that can only result in a massive political defeat.”

Could Mr. Harper have been wrong? Has he lost touch not only with a majority of Canadians, but also with his own formerly stalwart supporters?