OTTAWA — The Canadian Parliament is debating the country’s most significant national security reform in over a decade. The proposed act, known as Bill C-51, would supplement antiterror laws enacted following 9/11. Responding to United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for the criminalization of terrorism, that legislation — passed without partisan rancor — modified Canada’s criminal code, creating a host of new terror offenses.
In contrast, Bill C-51, proposed in January by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is a highly politicized response in a parliamentary election year to the October terrorist attacks in Ottawa. With Conservatives controlling the House of Commons, it is widely expected to pass before Parliament breaks in June.
Bill C-51 has many moving parts. Taking a breathtakingly broad view of national security, it facilitates information-sharing among federal institutions, with no robust limits on how that information may then be used (or misused). This is a remarkable development for a country that in 2007 agreed to pay millions to compensate a Canadian citizen who suffered foreign torture as a result of inaccurate intelligence-sharing.
The legislation would also augment police powers to preventively detain or restrict terror suspects. But when it comes to antiterrorism, its main goal is to enhance the covert powers of Canada’s security services.
Canada has a national police force and a mostly domestic intelligence service, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (C.S.I.S.). These organizations haven’t always worked well together. Spies and police have been known to unproductively chase the same targets. And spying has complicated police efforts to bring charges in open court: The C.S.I.S. often tries to protect its sources and methods in criminal proceedings that demand full disclosure.
The investigation into the 1985 Air India attack, when a bomb exploded on a plane en route from Toronto to New Delhi, killing 329 people, is a prime example of this disorganization. In 2010, a judicial commission of inquiry found that efforts to detect and prevent this attack had been undermined by a fundamental lack of cooperation between Canada’s spies and police, and urged reform. Bill C-51 rejects these calls, giving primacy to the C.S.I.S. and empowering it to carry out investigations without police assistance.
Bill C-51 would authorize the C.S.I.S. to “take measures, within or outside Canada, to reduce” national security threats. The government argues that this would enable a range of valuable actions, like allowing C.S.I.S. agents to speak with parents of potential terrorists. But the real endgame could be much more concerning. If the bill is passed, the C.S.I.S. could have the capacity to do things like block the return of Canadians fighting abroad; remove Web postings it found threatening; drain bank accounts; engage in disinformation campaigns; or bypass traditional police channels in order to detain suspects. The only limits explicitly spelled out in Bill C-51 are acts that would cause “death or bodily harm,” willfully obstruct justice or violate sexual integrity.
READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/opinion/canadas-antiterror-gamble.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1
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