D
Dervish
Guest
An excellent article on the matter.
For those saying they do not object to the intrusion of privacy since it potentially makes things safer for the nation and its citizens as a whole, I would like to point out that we are extremely fortunate to have these liberties and freedoms other countries have people literally dying for. For many people around the world, being able to remain anonymous online and not having the government being able to check in on their communications often means the difference between life and death or imprisonment. How many bloggers and journalists who spoke out against social norms or were on the trail of some illicit government activity have been incarcerated or killed in countries such as China and Russia? Granted, Canada and the US are fortunate to be free nations with high degrees of civil rights, but things can change suddenly and with little warning. I'm sure the citizens of Poland, for instance, weren't expecting to wake up one morning in 1939 and find their country invaded, and six years later they would endure decades of communist oppression. Point is, don't take your freedoms for granted. They might not always be there, as impossible as it may seem.
Another point that needs to be considered is that while it seems like everyone and everything has your personal information, it's not the case and there often has to be approvals set in motion to share personal information even between government departments. Bill C-51 can largely remove that for a lot of people, and things like foreign assets being frozen via sanction could in theory be applied to individuals. While a popular counterpoint is, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about" is a dangerously complacent and apathetic stance to have because yes, this targets terrorists and their sympathizers (and yes, this Bill also targets anyone who openly is supportive of terrorist group and actions without actually having committed a crime themselves), but it's so vaguely defined that it wouldn't be a stretch for a lot more than your Muslim extremist types to get caught up in a net. Canada doesn't have a great history of dealing with peaceful protests; remember back during the G20 summit in Toronto how numerous peaceful protestors were caught up in inescapable situations by being boxed in by the police and being detained for indeterminable amounts of time in what were basically temporary pens with no sanitation facilities to speak of? Those people broke no laws and were not being given the opportunity to disperse and that was how they were treated. Would an assembly like that be considered "disruptive of critical infrastructure" or an "unlawful assembly"? These are questions that aren't being answered, and it's that vagueness that's honestly one of the most terrifying aspects about this whole Bill.
Let's go back to the "I have nothing to hide" mentality. Let's say a future government gets in and decides that homosexuality is a crime, and despite universal protest from human rights groups, it's passed. It's not impossible Bill C-51 could be widened to target homosexuals as well as very vaguely defined terrorists. Of course, this is a super worst case scenario and I doubt it would ever come to pass, but I also didn't think the Canadian government would pass legislation without giving ample time to discuss the bill with all parties and experts; something like this should have never been passed in six months. It's not uncommon for many bills to be in discussion for over a year or more, and this is something that has basically opened the door for widespread Charter abuse. Just because something doesn't seemingly effect you immediately doesn't mean it won't later and it opens the door for future legislation that can be much, much worse.
Canada already has pretty robust anti-terror laws, and people have been prosecuted for spreading terrorist propaganda and so far every terror plot has been uncovered and stopped using existing methods. Those I applaud, even if in a lot of cases its already somewhat excessive. About the only thing you can't really prevent or stop are cases like the recent Ottawa shootings where a lone man with a legally obtained firearm killed a soldier and stormed Parliament Hill. And while it's important to detect and shutdown homegrown terrorism, Bill C-51's nature has a lot of potential to identify and prosecute the wrong people. Even with conventional legal systems, people get wrongfully convicted all the time, and the fact that CSIS suddenly has a wealth of new channels and all encompassing legislation without real oversight and specifics makes myself and many other people uneasy. Let's say somebody from a mosque in Markham goes and joins ISIS and his family and other members of that mosque had no idea of his extremist views, CSIS probably will start investigating several people in that Mosque and monitor their communications for quite some time. Imagine if you were friends with Justin Bourque, the Moncton shooter who killed 5 RCMP officers last year in a multi-day manhunt, and then you knew that there was a very real chance that absolutely every bit of online activity you were doing was being monitored. Would you feel comfortable, or would you feel violated? What if you, by chance, looked up something that set off a red flag and you found the cops knocking on your door the next day? These are things that need to be taken into consideration. Our Charter protects Canadian citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures, this is why judicial warrants are important because they're designed to protect our rights as outlined by the Charter. CSIS is afforded the ability to conduct these searches and potentially seizures with preauthorized warrants, and that alone is a violation of the Chapter. It's supposed to protect our Charter rights, not give the ability to violate them.
Another huge point of contention is that if the RCMP is under investigation for misconduct, there's proper channels and investigations in place to address that and monitor RCMP activities. In short, they can be held accountable for wrong doings. CSIS doesn't have that, and because it's an intelligence agency, it doesn't have the same framework as a federal police organization and the only time you'll know they did something wrong is if they fucked up royally. Before this Bill, CSIS' mandate was exclusively to gather and analyze intelligence and pass off relevant intelligence to the proper authorities, such as the RCMP or DND. This Bill gives them much more hands-on capabilities, that once again, have no proper oversight. How do you hold an organization accountable if you have no way of knowing what they're up to?
And here's the big kicker, from the article I linked at the top of the post:
Here we get to a major conceptual problem with C-51: Section 1 of the Charter allows rights to be invaded where such invasion is "reasonable" in a free and democratic society, but only when "prescribed by law"—which usually means specified by statute—on top of being justified by a rigorous legal test. A judge who is presented with a warrant application from CSIS is in no position to invent a new exception to a Charter right. Which is to say: Nothing in our constitutional tradition suggests that a judge is competent, by warrant, to "prescribe by law" a Section 1 Charter exception on an ad hoc basis.
This aspect of our critique may sound obscure. But the ramifications are enormous. Bill C-51, if passed, would allow Federal Court judges to limit all sorts of Charter rights, including the right of Canadian citizens to return to Canada. What's worse, there is no guarantee that such judicial decisions will be made public, given the need for secrecy in terror cases.
Moreover, there would be no democratic discussion. The British Parliament is having a debate over the validity of exclusion orders that keep citizens who have joined ISIS from coming back home. We are not having such a debate, because our parliament is being asked to sign a blank cheque for Charter violations under C-51's new CSIS warrant scheme.
We could be wrong in our appraisal of how courts will construe these powers. But we won't know for certain, because any deliberation on this question will be conducted in a warrant proceeding. In other words, all these weighty legal deliberations will be done in secret, with only the judge and the government side represented. The person affected by the illegal activity will not be there, nor likely will ever know what government agency visited the misfortune upon them.
They cannot defend their rights. No civil rights group will be able to weigh in on their behalf. The overall results, we fear, will be an opaque parliamentary debate on the merits of this law followed by a one-sided legal discussion about its application.
So, as you can see, there's a lot wrong with this Bill and a lot to be scared of. We won't know the full ramification of Bill C-51 for years, but I promise you, it won't be pretty.
For those saying they do not object to the intrusion of privacy since it potentially makes things safer for the nation and its citizens as a whole, I would like to point out that we are extremely fortunate to have these liberties and freedoms other countries have people literally dying for. For many people around the world, being able to remain anonymous online and not having the government being able to check in on their communications often means the difference between life and death or imprisonment. How many bloggers and journalists who spoke out against social norms or were on the trail of some illicit government activity have been incarcerated or killed in countries such as China and Russia? Granted, Canada and the US are fortunate to be free nations with high degrees of civil rights, but things can change suddenly and with little warning. I'm sure the citizens of Poland, for instance, weren't expecting to wake up one morning in 1939 and find their country invaded, and six years later they would endure decades of communist oppression. Point is, don't take your freedoms for granted. They might not always be there, as impossible as it may seem.
Another point that needs to be considered is that while it seems like everyone and everything has your personal information, it's not the case and there often has to be approvals set in motion to share personal information even between government departments. Bill C-51 can largely remove that for a lot of people, and things like foreign assets being frozen via sanction could in theory be applied to individuals. While a popular counterpoint is, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about" is a dangerously complacent and apathetic stance to have because yes, this targets terrorists and their sympathizers (and yes, this Bill also targets anyone who openly is supportive of terrorist group and actions without actually having committed a crime themselves), but it's so vaguely defined that it wouldn't be a stretch for a lot more than your Muslim extremist types to get caught up in a net. Canada doesn't have a great history of dealing with peaceful protests; remember back during the G20 summit in Toronto how numerous peaceful protestors were caught up in inescapable situations by being boxed in by the police and being detained for indeterminable amounts of time in what were basically temporary pens with no sanitation facilities to speak of? Those people broke no laws and were not being given the opportunity to disperse and that was how they were treated. Would an assembly like that be considered "disruptive of critical infrastructure" or an "unlawful assembly"? These are questions that aren't being answered, and it's that vagueness that's honestly one of the most terrifying aspects about this whole Bill.
Let's go back to the "I have nothing to hide" mentality. Let's say a future government gets in and decides that homosexuality is a crime, and despite universal protest from human rights groups, it's passed. It's not impossible Bill C-51 could be widened to target homosexuals as well as very vaguely defined terrorists. Of course, this is a super worst case scenario and I doubt it would ever come to pass, but I also didn't think the Canadian government would pass legislation without giving ample time to discuss the bill with all parties and experts; something like this should have never been passed in six months. It's not uncommon for many bills to be in discussion for over a year or more, and this is something that has basically opened the door for widespread Charter abuse. Just because something doesn't seemingly effect you immediately doesn't mean it won't later and it opens the door for future legislation that can be much, much worse.
Canada already has pretty robust anti-terror laws, and people have been prosecuted for spreading terrorist propaganda and so far every terror plot has been uncovered and stopped using existing methods. Those I applaud, even if in a lot of cases its already somewhat excessive. About the only thing you can't really prevent or stop are cases like the recent Ottawa shootings where a lone man with a legally obtained firearm killed a soldier and stormed Parliament Hill. And while it's important to detect and shutdown homegrown terrorism, Bill C-51's nature has a lot of potential to identify and prosecute the wrong people. Even with conventional legal systems, people get wrongfully convicted all the time, and the fact that CSIS suddenly has a wealth of new channels and all encompassing legislation without real oversight and specifics makes myself and many other people uneasy. Let's say somebody from a mosque in Markham goes and joins ISIS and his family and other members of that mosque had no idea of his extremist views, CSIS probably will start investigating several people in that Mosque and monitor their communications for quite some time. Imagine if you were friends with Justin Bourque, the Moncton shooter who killed 5 RCMP officers last year in a multi-day manhunt, and then you knew that there was a very real chance that absolutely every bit of online activity you were doing was being monitored. Would you feel comfortable, or would you feel violated? What if you, by chance, looked up something that set off a red flag and you found the cops knocking on your door the next day? These are things that need to be taken into consideration. Our Charter protects Canadian citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures, this is why judicial warrants are important because they're designed to protect our rights as outlined by the Charter. CSIS is afforded the ability to conduct these searches and potentially seizures with preauthorized warrants, and that alone is a violation of the Chapter. It's supposed to protect our Charter rights, not give the ability to violate them.
Another huge point of contention is that if the RCMP is under investigation for misconduct, there's proper channels and investigations in place to address that and monitor RCMP activities. In short, they can be held accountable for wrong doings. CSIS doesn't have that, and because it's an intelligence agency, it doesn't have the same framework as a federal police organization and the only time you'll know they did something wrong is if they fucked up royally. Before this Bill, CSIS' mandate was exclusively to gather and analyze intelligence and pass off relevant intelligence to the proper authorities, such as the RCMP or DND. This Bill gives them much more hands-on capabilities, that once again, have no proper oversight. How do you hold an organization accountable if you have no way of knowing what they're up to?
And here's the big kicker, from the article I linked at the top of the post:
Here we get to a major conceptual problem with C-51: Section 1 of the Charter allows rights to be invaded where such invasion is "reasonable" in a free and democratic society, but only when "prescribed by law"—which usually means specified by statute—on top of being justified by a rigorous legal test. A judge who is presented with a warrant application from CSIS is in no position to invent a new exception to a Charter right. Which is to say: Nothing in our constitutional tradition suggests that a judge is competent, by warrant, to "prescribe by law" a Section 1 Charter exception on an ad hoc basis.
This aspect of our critique may sound obscure. But the ramifications are enormous. Bill C-51, if passed, would allow Federal Court judges to limit all sorts of Charter rights, including the right of Canadian citizens to return to Canada. What's worse, there is no guarantee that such judicial decisions will be made public, given the need for secrecy in terror cases.
Moreover, there would be no democratic discussion. The British Parliament is having a debate over the validity of exclusion orders that keep citizens who have joined ISIS from coming back home. We are not having such a debate, because our parliament is being asked to sign a blank cheque for Charter violations under C-51's new CSIS warrant scheme.
We could be wrong in our appraisal of how courts will construe these powers. But we won't know for certain, because any deliberation on this question will be conducted in a warrant proceeding. In other words, all these weighty legal deliberations will be done in secret, with only the judge and the government side represented. The person affected by the illegal activity will not be there, nor likely will ever know what government agency visited the misfortune upon them.
They cannot defend their rights. No civil rights group will be able to weigh in on their behalf. The overall results, we fear, will be an opaque parliamentary debate on the merits of this law followed by a one-sided legal discussion about its application.
So, as you can see, there's a lot wrong with this Bill and a lot to be scared of. We won't know the full ramification of Bill C-51 for years, but I promise you, it won't be pretty.
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