This is Harper’s “War is Peace” moment. If anything can bring his decade of division, deception and deconstruction to a merciful end, it will be this piece of democracy-killing legislation.
Just as he stopped Harper’s illegal appointment of Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court of Canada, constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati has vowed to challenge C-51 as fascist and dictatorial:
“What this legislation creates is a modern-day Gestapo,” Galati said. “No exaggeration, that’s what it creates. It chills, censors and criminalizes free speech, free association and constitutional rights of assembly. It takes all your private information and shares it with all government agencies, including foreign governments …”
Given C-51’s contents, the PM can no longer hide his true colours with reassuring ads about “protecting” families on the one hand, and vicious ads attacking his rivals on the other. It can’t be swept off the page by another Beatles medley.
And it can’t be supported today with the promise of amending it on some tomorrow that may never come — as Justin Trudeau has done.
And what was the Liberal leader thinking when he asked the very senators he ejected from the national caucus to support C-51? After all, it gives authorities the right to designate political criticism of the government’s policies against terrorism as a crime in itself. There was never any persuasive argument for doing anything but planting your feet firmly and fighting this bill — as the NDP and the Green Party have done from the beginning.
C-51 is the transparent and triumphant work of someone who likes martial authority, likes being photographed around people in uniform, likes dishing out punishment to anyone who crosses him, and wants to turn Canada into a giant yard-sale for the oligarchs who run things. The most repressive kingdom on Earth gets Canadian weapons and the Wheat Board. The nation with the world’s worst human rights record snares a long-term trade deal and Nexen. Even Tim’s is gone.
And have you noticed that there’s no war Stephen Harper doesn’t want to get in on, or foment? His stupefying habit of baiting Russian President Vladimir Putin is only the most recent example; Harper runs Canadian foreign policy as though it were a rumble in a parking lot. And now he has navigated the most undemocratic piece of legislation of his term — his legacy bill — through the democratic institutions he controls completely for another few months.
The hacker collective Anonymous gets it. C-51 is designed for the things Harper doesn’t like. He doesn’t like free speech. He doesn’t like protestors who take their convictions to the street. He doesn’t like public information getting out there without his approval — so he doesn’t like any displays of independence from scientists, journalists, bureaucrats or judges. He doesn’t like unions, or environmentalists, or opposition in any form. C-51 is made by and for a man who — like every dictator everywhere — thinks that his should be the last word on everything.
By now, it’s not news to say that C-51 violates the rights and freedoms of every Canadian. Like Harper himself, this new law will operate in the penumbral world of tightly-held information — that perpetual Harperland twilight where you can’t quite see anything clearly. Massive discretionary power is being handed over to a group that is professionally averse to oversight. They want your information (15 million downloads tracked per day at the Communications Security Establishment) but you’re not entitled to theirs. From his end, Harper’s idea of public dialogue is a perpetual photo-op.
There’s something new here. The police state usually pads up behind you on cat’s paws. But this time, Harper has stabbed his finger into everyone’s chest to give us a hearty shove. This is a blatant, brazen grab for the kind of power no leader in a democracy should seek — let alone have in perpetuity.
How can there be unfettered sharing of information between departments of government without massive and illegal privacy violations? With foreign governments involved, how in the world do we avoid another Maher Arar? If Harper is returned to government armed with C-51, his security, police and intelligence apparatus will be virtually above the law.
Unlike the temporary measures taken by the Liberals after 9/11, C-51 is a monster designed to grow. There are no sunset provisions, there is no parliamentary oversight; the statute reads as though it were written on a napkin at a fast-food joint at closing time. Where it should be precise and prescriptive, C-51 is hopelessly open-ended and discursive — the opposite of good law.
Bottom line? C-51 says whatever CSIS, CSE, the RCMP and the federal government want it to say. It is not an anti-terror measure; it is a manifesto for a police state, conferring on it vast powers to spy on and control its citizens. This blather about being at war with ISIS is utter nonsense.
Lurking behind this monstrous bill is Stephen Harper’s broader mission: the destruction by other means of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The question needs to be asked. How did a piece of legislation that has raised the ire of four prime ministers, five former Supreme Court justices, First Nations Chiefs, the 36,000 lawyers of the Canadian Bar Association, 51,000 members of the Postal Union and even former CSIS agents ever make it out of the Department of Justice, let alone through the House of Commons?
The answer is simple. It emerged for the same reason that half a dozen other bills that were struck down by the Supreme Court did: federal lawyers in Justice didn’t care whether the bills were consistent with the charter.
That is not some airy-fairy theory. Edgar Schmidt, a former senior lawyer in the federal Justice department, is suing the government for not thoroughly evaluating proposed bills to see if they might violate the Canadian Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Schmidt, whose challenge began in 2012, has argued that the Department of Justice “had its lawyers apply only a flawed and minimal screening test … Inadequate examination of proposed legislation for compliance with human rights appears to infringe Canadian legal requirements that dictate the degree of scrutiny to which legislation must be subject. Falling short of the legal standard raises questions of the degree to which the rule of law is respected by the federal government of Canada.”
Stephen Harper has politicized everything he has touched since winning power in 2006, including the RCMP and the Justice department. The flawed bills that have ended up in front of the Supreme Court were deliberately put forward to challenge the supremacy of the Charter of Rights, the enduring creation of Harper’s arch-enemy, the hated Pierre Trudeau. When they were rejected, Harper and his cronies raged against the “interventionist” court, singling out the Chief Justice herself for a public dissing.
Now we know Harper broke the law by pressuring for the destruction of long-gun registry data, even though the Information Commissioner was in the middle of an investigation. Steve’s answer? Pass a retroactive law, and leave it to the 2015 winner of the Paul Calandra Medal for Public Stupidity — Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney — to defend it.
This PM isn’t interested in the rule of law, but the rule of Steve. And that is what Bill C-51 is all about — and why this guy should be running North Korea, not Canada.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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