Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Party is the party of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is also the party of multiculturalism, pluralism, and respect for diversity. The charter is one of Canada's proudest achievements. All Canadians, whatever their origins, cultural or religious backgrounds, or affiliations, know where they stand under the charter. They stand as equals. In deciding how to vote on any piece of legislation, we in the Liberal caucus always employ a key criterion: Does the legislation respect the charter? At the same time, Liberals are unshakably committed to ensuring the physical safety of all Canadians.
As Justice Lamer once said, and I paraphrase, safety from imminent harm is at the core of the values of dignity, integrity, and autonomy of the individual. These are also the values at the core of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Therefore, the charter is consistent both with individual liberties and with the notion of protecting community and individual safety.
Like all members in this House, we in the Liberal caucus live in communities. We have families and neighbours. We want them and all fellow Canadians to be safe from violence. It is precisely because of our dual adherence to the charter and to the need for public safety that Liberals will be supporting Bill S-7 at third reading, as we have done throughout the legislative process surrounding this bill.
Bill S-7 contains a number of important provisions. First, it reintroduces two public security measures, investigative hearings and recognizance with conditions, that a Liberal government introduced in 2001 with sunset clauses that took effect five years later in 2006 and nullified these measures as originally planned.
Prior to sunsetting, section 83.28 of the Criminal Code, which referred to investigative hearings, permitted a peace officer to apply to a judge for an order requiring a witness believed to have information concerning a terrorism offence, past or imminent, to appear before the judge to answer questions. This measure was accompanied by important safeguards. Among other things, the witness in an investigative hearing was protected against self-incrimination in reference to a future criminal proceeding and had the right to retain and instruct legal counsel. Also, the presiding judge could impose conditions on hearings in the interest of protecting the witness. For example, the judge could order that the witness' identity not be made public. The Supreme Court has ruled investigative hearings to be constitutional. In other words, they are charter-compliant.
Recognizance with conditions, in other words, preventative arrests under section 83.3 of the Criminal Code with a view to preventing a potential act of terrorism, also contains safeguards. Invoking this measure required the prior consent of the Attorney General and a provincial court judge unless the peace officer suspected immediate detention was necessary, in which case the detained individual had to be brought before a judge within 24 hours or as soon as feasible.
This section was slightly amended in its reintroduction through Bill S-7 to ensure conformity of the original provision with the Supreme Court decision in Regina v. Hall, a case related to detention without bail. The amended version in Bill S-7 is meant to narrow the scope of reasons for which the individual could be detained.
I should mention for the benefit of those who doubt whether the government's attitude to combatting terrorism is constitutional that this past December the Supreme Court unanimously rejected claims that the 10-year-old terrorism sections of the Criminal Code had defined terrorist activity so broadly that these sections threatened free expression. The court said that the anti-terrorism law is “...respectful of diversity, as it allows for the non-violent expression of political, religious or ideological views.”
The court also found that the definition of terrorist activity is not so broad as to capture innocent individuals in its legal net. The court specified that:
For example, the conduct of a restaurant owner who cooks a single meal for a known terrorist is not of a nature to materially enhance the abilities of a terrorist group to facilitate or carry out a terrorist activity.
Therefore, it would not constitute a terrorism offence.
A second feature of Bill S-7 is that it introduces a new offence that security experts have told the public safety committee they need to be effective in fighting terrorism in the present-day context, which is, the offence of leaving or attempting to leave Canada for the purpose of engaging in terrorist activity, whether to attend a terrorist training camp, or to take part in any kind of terrorist-related action. As we know, Canadians have been implicated in terrorist incidents overseas, namely in Algeria and Bulgaria.
Richard Fadden, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, recently testified that while this new offence was perhaps not needed a few years ago, he is now more concerned about the radicalization of individuals in Canada who become inspired, often through the Internet, by the extremist narrative.
Furthermore, as mentioned in the CBC report on the subject:
Ray Boisvert, former assistant director of intelligence with CSIS..., said radicalization is a "growing pattern" in Canada. CSIS has identified up to 50 people who have left Canada to fight abroad.
For those who might fall prey to generalizations about the source of extremism in Canada, the path to violent extremism does not originate in particular communities. This is according to CSIS.
Since 2001, there are communities that have been the object of suspicion. This saddens me because distrust of newcomers is not a new phenomenon. Different cultural and religious groups have been held in suspicion throughout history, and across societies. Such treatment has created hurt and frustration in these communities. Sometimes persons and property in these communities have suffered harm.
Even when this has not been the case, community members, especially the young, otherwise excited about opportunities for growth and success, often understandably passionate about contributing to the greater societal good, believe their opportunities to be limited because of their identification with their cultural group of origin.
This is why I was so interested and pleased to learn of the conclusions of a CSIS intelligence assessment branch study on radicalization in Canada. The study affirms that the path to violent zealotry is ultimately “an idiosyncratic individual process”.
Allow me to refer to some of the study's conclusions, as reported in a Globe and Mail column by Doug Saunders, entitled “Canada's looking for terrorists in all the wrong places”.
I will quote and paraphrase:
[Canadian extremists] are almost always native-born Canadians, rarely immigrants, and never refugees.
Not only are they not immigrants, but they don't tend to be found within “parallel society” immigrant enclaves. And they aren't radicalized by attending a mosque.
Britain's MI5 analyzed several hundred violent extremists and found similar non-immigrant...backgrounds—and that, as in Canada, these extremists don’t come from religious backgrounds. “Most are religious novices,” the security service concluded, and, in fact, “there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalization”.
U.S. experts have come to the same conclusions. Mark Fallon, formerly with U.S. counterterrorism, has confirmed that migration experiences, religious traditions, and theology almost never cause radicalism.
To quote Doug Saunders in conclusion:
The path from strict religious faith to violence simply doesn't exist—in fact, the most religious are among the least likely to become extremists.
[Terrorism] is a criminal tendency, neither imported nor theological, not rooted in communities or faiths.
This new offence of leaving or attempting to leave Canada for the purposes of engaging in a terrorist-related activity, similar to many of the current terrorism offences in the Criminal Code, is designed to allow for arrests and charges at the early planning stage of terrorist attacks outside Canada, before a person even leaves Canada to commit terrorist acts.
As usual, the offence comes with safeguards. To quote Donald Piragoff, senior assistant deputy minister, policy sector, Justice Canada:
[The leaving or attempting to leave Canada offences] require the consent of the Attorney General before charges are laid. It's not simply a police officer who makes the determination; you have to get the consent of the Attorney General to say that the prosecution or an arrest would be appropriate.
Moreover, this new offence is not so broad that it would prevent someone from, say, going to a survival camp in Colorado or in the Middle East.
As Mr. Piragoff also noted before committee:
It's not an offence to go to a survival camp...to learn how to shoot an AK-47. However, if the person is going to learn how to shoot an AK-47 for the express purpose of helping improve the capacity of a terrorist group, that makes it an offence.
Finally, Bill S-7 would introduce legislative guarantees of greater government transparency and accountability in dealing with matters of national security that come before the courts or an administrative proceeding. It would introduce amendments to the Canada Evidence Act that would make it more difficult for the government to use national security concerns as a routine justification for suppressing information that is in the public interest of a democracy, information that is often essential to permitting a fair trial for an accused.
Some of the changes to the Canada Evidence Act in Bill S-7 implement the decisions of the Federal Court in Toronto Star Newspaper Limited v. Canada, and Ottawa Citizen Group v. Canada. In essence, it would no longer be in the power of the Attorney General to determine, even against the opinion of the court, whether information relating to a case or a proceeding must remain confidential. That discretion would now belong to the presiding judge, who must presumptively abide by the open court principle and allow only very limited exceptions.
