Bill S-7 (Historical)

Combating Terrorism Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Canada Evidence Act and the Security of Information Act

This enactment replaces sections 83.28 to 83.3 of the Criminal Code to provide for an investigative hearing for the purpose of gathering information for an investigation of a terrorism offence and to allow for the imposition of a recognizance with conditions on a person to prevent them from carrying out a terrorist activity. In addition, the enactment provides for those sections to cease to have effect or for the possible extension of their operation. The enactment also provides that the Attorney General of Canada and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness include in their respective annual reports their opinion on whether those sections should be extended. It also amends the Criminal Code to create offences of leaving or attempting to leave Canada to commit certain terrorism offences.
The enactment also amends the Canada Evidence Act to allow the Federal Court to order that applications to it with respect to the disclosure of sensitive or potentially injurious information be made public and to allow it to order that hearings related to those applications be heard in private. In addition, the enactment provides for the annual reporting on the operation of the provisions of that Act that relate to the issuance of certificates and fiats.
The enactment also amends the Security of Information Act to increase, in certain cases, the maximum penalty for harbouring a person who committed an offence under that Act.
Lastly, it makes technical amendments in response to a parliamentary review of these Acts.

Combating Terrorism Act

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent analysis. All Canadians are deeply frustrated with the level of incoherent violence we are seeing, especially with what happened in Boston, and we have seen it in other communities.

In terms of the so-called solutions being offered here, two of the key provisions of the bill were brought forward by the Chrétien Liberals in 2001, at a time when they were telling us that basic freedoms could be done away with. It was an era in which they were going to support rendition and torture.

Those two provisions—the ability to hold someone without charge and to force someone before a judge to give evidence against themselves, which would undermine one of the most basic civil rights—were so contentious that even the Liberals agreed to sunset them. In the years they were in place, they were never used once.

I ask my hon. colleague why he thinks it is now, after the Liberals had promised to sunset these very fundamental threats to the legal landscape of Canada, that they are sneaking in behind the Conservatives to once again push through two provisions that undermine basic rights of any Canadian?

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the question from the member for Timmins—James Bay points to something I mentioned in my speech, which is that I am very perplexed about the Liberals' response.

They have two choices: either they were disingenuous in 2001 when they suggested they needed sunset clauses and they were only doing it to get the support of the public at that time, or they are disingenuous now. They cannot have it both ways. Either these were dangerous things that threatened our rights, as they said in 2001, or they are dangerous things that threaten our rights now, when the Liberals are supporting the bill without sunset clauses.

I am, again, perplexed by the position of the Liberal Party on Bill S-7. I am very disappointed to see the Liberals voting in favour.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend is also a neighbour in the riding of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca.

On a related but different point, I want to thank him for raising in question period yesterday the need to support our firefighters. Motion No. 388 went through, although we seem to have no action to bring it into place, and that relates to terrorist acts, as we noted in the Boston Marathon. Everyone was amazed to see the first responders run toward danger when everyone else was running in the other direction.

However, I stand with him in finding, despite my concerns about terrorism, that this current law, Bill S-7, goes too far, and that the existing tools and law in the Criminal Code are more than adequate. I stand with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, the international civil liberties organizations, as well as with the concerns expressed at committee by the Canadian Bar Association, in believing that the bill potentially violates our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and will therefore be struck down later.

I wonder if he could comment on the futility of passing laws in this place when there are significant doubts that they are charter compliant.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands and I stand in somewhat the same place on this issue. The NDP has had this question for a long time. When legislation is introduced, the Minister of Justice has a responsibility to certify that it would not violate the charter, but the minister has set a very low bar: we have heard reports that if there is even a 5% chance that the law will be upheld in the courts, the government is willing to go ahead and introduce that bill.

I also want to thank my colleague for raising the issue of first responders. The Conservatives say that we have the resources we need, that we have done the things we need to do. Firefighters would be one of our most important resources in any terrorist attack and they were one of the most important resources in Boston, so it shocks me that in this country we have failed to implement a compensation fund for the families of fallen firefighters. The only argument made by the government yesterday against this fund was that it would be simply too expensive. I was disappointed to hear that argument. It was quite a shocking statement, because the tragic loss of firefighters has a cost, and right now those costs are borne by their families.

[Marc-André Morin, NDP, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like the hon. member to talk about something that has not really been explored.

In most cases—such as Boston and many other examples—the perpetrators of the attacks had already been identified by the police as radicals. Could the answer simply be to provide more resources in order to conduct investigations in those countries and make sure that the people identified as radicals are not dangerous? I think that would solve the problem. It is all well and good to provide tools to the police, but you do not give someone a hammer to kill a fly on a window.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague's question brings me back to one of the major points in my speech. One of the major things that is lacking in the debate about this legislation is the question of resources. Why do police agencies miss people who have been identified as radicals? Probably because they have too much work to do to devote the necessary resources to identifying those who could be potential threats.

As we saw in the case of the Boston Marathon, the police were given virtually unlimited resources in a short period of time and using traditional enforcement investigation methods, basic police tactics not extreme laws which threaten people's rights, they were able to produce results in very short order.

Rather than creating this law which would threaten basic liberties, we need to turn our attention toward providing resources to the police and our security agencies so they can get the job done.

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, like a number of my colleagues, I will start by denouncing the reasons behind debating this bill today.

Bill S-7, the Combating Terrorism Act, could have been brought back to the House quite a while ago. If the government really believed that this bill was vital to the safety of Canadians, it could have decided to debate it a long time ago. If the government truly believes that this bill is vital and it did not put it on the agenda until yesterday, then it is negligent.

However, I do not think that is the case. I really think the government decided to take advantage of recent events in order to muster public opinion. That is also what the editorial team of The Globe and Mail thinks.

Let us be clear. Like all my NDP colleagues and all my colleagues in the House, I condemn terrorism. To quote the former secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, “terrorist acts are never justified, no matter what considerations may be invoked.” I condemn the Boston bombing and I condemned the September 11 attacks. I condemn the bombings that take place throughout the world every day. I want to take this opportunity to commend all the law enforcement officers who in any way participated in the investigation that led to yesterday's arrests. Well done.

Many of my loved ones have been affected by terrorism. Whether it was because of the Algerian war or the Islamic Army in the 1990s, my loved ones have lived in fear. I have learned one thing from this: it is always civilians who pay the price for such senseless violence.

I also had the experience of being in a place where bombs were dropped when I worked as a medical volunteer for the Red Crescent during the first Gulf War, and so I know the effects and dangers of terrorism. I am therefore proud to stand in the House and oppose this bill.

I am opposed to this bill for many reasons. The first, but by no means the least of these, is that I believe in the rule of law. This bill, as it currently stands, violates the most fundamental civil liberties and human rights. I want to prevent attacks on Canada, but I also want to prevent the arbitrary arrests and the abuse we see in police states.

In Canada, we already have laws that punish crimes of terror and give law enforcement officers the tools they need to protect national security. In this morning's edition of Le Devoir, there is a great quote by Nathalie Des Rosiers, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. In reference to the case of Canadians involved in the hostage situation at the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria, she said:

If the police had had any evidence, they would have done something. There are many provisions in the Criminal Code under which these individuals could have been arrested.

Denis Barrette, a spokesperson for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, made a similar speech in 2011. He said:

We know as well that these provisions could, as we see it, be abused. I am thinking here of the Air India case. We believe that Canadians will be better served and better protected under the usual provisions of the Criminal Code, rather than others that are completely unnecessary. Reliance on arbitrary powers and a lower standard of evidence can never replace good, effective police work.

The NDP wants to strike a balance between safety and people's rights and freedoms. We proposed numerous amendments to the bill in order to strike that balance. The government rejected them all. However, I found them to be quite reasonable.

The committee members would have had plenty of choice if they had wanted to pass even one amendment as a sign of goodwill, which they obviously did not do, because my colleagues proposed 18 amendments. I would like to mention a few of the amendments so that Canadians can judge for themselves just how stubborn this Conservative government is, how obsessed it is with always being right and how it believes itself to be infallible.

Here are a few of them: ask the Security Intelligence Review Committee to look at the possibility of an inter-agency co-operation protocol to ensure that it would be effective and that rights protected by law would be respected, and have that protocol in place before the leaving the country offences could come into effect; establish the right to state-funded legal aid if a person had to attend an investigative hearing; add a comprehensive review of the government's implementation of the Arar commission's recommendations with regard to accountability and oversight mechanisms, with particular attention to oversight and activities among agencies; and include the advice of the Canadian Human Rights Commission on the racial discrimination and profiling issues surrounding Bill S-7.

Really? I thought it was impossible to be against virtue. These are just a few examples of the amendments put forward by the NDP, but to no avail. The members of this government rejected them all, one by one. I would also like to point out that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals even bothered to propose any amendments to this bill.

Many of the measures in this bill were suggested in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. These measures expired in 2007, so they have not been in force for the past five years, and when they were in force, they were used a grand total of zero times. Zero, zéro, sifr, none, nada, never.

I would like to quote something former CSIS director Reid Morden said in 2010 about some of these measures:

I confess I never thought that they should have been introduced in the first place and that they slipped in, in the kind of scrambling around that the government did after 9/11.

He added:

Police and security forces have perfectly sufficient powers to do their jobs. They don't need more powers.

We in the NDP will continue to fight to achieve a balance between personal rights and freedoms and people's safety. We believe that the provisions included in this bill provide no additional protection to anyone in this country. I would remind hon. members that this bill is in its present form because the government refused the 18 amendments we proposed in committee in order to strike a balance between safety and rights and freedoms. Accordingly, I cannot support this bill.

Furthermore, this bill leaves out some of the additional protections that were included in the 2001 legislation. An editorial published in today's Ottawa Citizen entitled “No need for new laws” shares many of our concerns. To quote that article:

The idea that the state can arrest and detain someone who has not done anything criminal runs counter to the fundamental values of our society.

For all these reasons, I will oppose this bill and I will vote against it with pride and with my head held high.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health]

Mr. Speaker, I think the member realizes that the first job of any government is to keep Canadians safe from those who wish to harm us. International terrorism is going to continue to be a threat in the foreseeable future. Bill S-7 would provide law enforcement and national security agencies with further means to anticipate and respond effectively to terrorism.

That is what I want to ask her about, anticipation, because the bill would assist law enforcement in disrupting terrorist attacks by compelling suspects to appear before a court in advance of a suspected terrorist attack. Once the attack occurs, there is nothing we can do about it. This would create new offences for leaving or attempting to leave Canada for the purpose of committing a terrorist offence.

Does the member think these new initiatives are a good idea, and if not, what does she suggest we put in place to stop terrorist attacks before they occur? If there are any other ideas she has, I would like to hear them.

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague opposite, who is a fellow member of the Standing Committee on Health, which runs smoothly.

Unfortunately, I do not agree with this bill. The NDP believes that Canada must give serious consideration to the issue of terrorism while maintaining the rights and freedoms of all Canadians.

This bill is not the right response to the threat of terrorism. It would reintroduce measures that, in the past, have proven to be unwarranted and ineffective.

[Alain Giguère, NDP, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this bill is a sad reminder that police forces are needed to combat terrorists.

How can the government claim that it wants to combat terrorism with legislation when the budgets of counter-terrorism organizations are being slashed? There was a subsidy to help municipal police combat street gangs and stop recruiters from getting young people involved in terrorist organizations. That subsidy has disappeared.

How can we fight terrorism when the only tools we have are laws that take away our rights and the tools police need to fight terrorism?

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I truly understand how he feels about this bill.

We know that this Conservative government is slashing budgets everywhere, including the budgets for community police services.

How can we expect community police, or other enforcement services, to do their job properly if they do not have the required means? We know very well that satellites and sophisticated devices are not the way to collect reliable information.

We have to provide the tools and the means, even if only to those in the field, to detect any activity that could result in a terrorist act.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Mr. Speaker, does my colleague agree that many people familiar with the issue support the NDP's position that, so far, most of our legislation has been able to control the situation and that it is sufficiently clear?

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague and riding neighbour.

As I just mentioned, many important people support our position, including Denis Barrette, a spokesperson for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group; Ihsaan Gardee, the executive director of the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations; Ziyaad Mia, the chair of the Advocacy and Research Committee of the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association; Carmen Cheung, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association; and Nathalie Des Rosiers, the general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. All of these people agree with us.

[Alain Giguère, NDP, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the objective of this bill deserves to be examined, and we must look at what has happened in the past.

In his book On War, Von Clausewitz defined war as “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will”. What is the will of terrorists? It is quite simple. They want to force us to give up our rights, our freedom of press and our democratic right to elect our leaders. That is their objective. Our response must be to reinforce those values and absolutely not to abandon them. That is the issue here.

This situation makes me think of a chicken farmer who witnesses his chickens being killed by a fox and decides to punish the chickens instead of going after the fox. We must combat terrorism. Our best weapon to do so—the strongest and most reliable weapon—is democracy.

We have a police force that is organized and able to democratically defend our society against acts of terrorism. It is perfectly able to do so. Canada has not yet experienced any acts of terrorism because our police forces have been able to prevent them from happening with our existing legislation. Democracy is precisely what we are talking about today.

Winston Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others. This means that there are no others. This is our system and we must defend it. We value democracy and we abhor terrorism.

It is a devious, treacherous adversary, and when it attacks, Canada must respond appropriately. We arrest terrorists and judge them based on our laws, not theirs.

This situation is particularly controversial. As we know, the legislation expired six years ago, in 2007. For the past six years, it has not been in force and it has never been used since 2001. There was not one investigative hearing or any situation in which authorities needed to resort to recognizance with conditions. This speaks volumes about the effectiveness of this bill.

I have the sinking feeling that this bill is being used because certain things in the media have created a sense of insecurity among the population. It is very troubling to know that some young people were recruited in the Toronto area to participate in terrorist activities in Algeria. It is also troubling to find out that people who were in Canada were preparing to commit a terrorist attack against a VIA Rail passenger train. That is pure terror.

It is only normal for people to be afraid. What is not normal, however, is to see a government that feeds this fear and uses it to give itself additional powers that work against the population. It is abusing its own population because terrorism exists. That is what terrorism is. Using people's natural sense of terror to give oneself additional powers that take away people's rights is also a form of terrorism.

The parliamentary secretary talked about the NDP amendment concerning people who have served in a foreign army that is illegally occupying another country. One of the objectives of this bill is to prohibit people from leaving Canada to serve in a foreign organization.

Consider the following three examples. A young Syrian returns to his country of origin to serve in the Syrian army against the rebels. Is that young man a terrorist?

A young Canadian does his Israeli military service in the occupied territories. Is that young man a terrorist? A young Somali returns home to participate in a religious war against the people he calls infidels. Is that young man a terrorist?

Terrorism will not be defined by the acts committed, but by the people targeted by these acts. Are the perpetrators considered to be insignificant? They may or may not commit these acts. We will use our judgment and our international values to establish who is and who is not a terrorist. However, all three will do exactly the same thing—use violence to force people to obey their orders. That situation requires clarification, something that this legislation does not and will not provide, because that is not what the Conservatives want.

The NDP is opposed to this bill for good reason. It is an ineffective piece of legislation. It does not target terrorism; it targets the civil rights of Canadians. Once again, the Conservatives are using a dualist turn: if you are not with us, you are against us. That is from a speech by George W. Bush, the loser. The government has adopted a loser as its model. That says a lot about this government, which is an assortment of losers, people who cut police budgets, withdraw into themselves and believe that all other countries are enemies with which they must not speak, instead of fighting terrorism effectively by increasing police resources and entering into international agreements for the exchange of information. The government is telling us that we have no choice and that we have to sacrifice our rights so that they have the means to fight terrorists. Fortunately, our police do not need this government. Our police manage to carry on without this government, which hinders them by taking away the resources they need and access to information.

Bill S-7 therefore violates civil liberties and human rights, particularly the right to remain silent and the right to not be imprisoned without a fair trial. According to the spirit of those rights, the weight of the state should never be used against an individual to force him to testify against himself. Yet here we are with Bill S-7. There is a reason why, in 2001, the first version of the bill had a sunset clause. It was a protection to ensure that the violation of our rights would not lead to the definitive loss of our rights. In 2007, the act fell into disuse. I can guarantee you that terrorists were not roaming the streets spreading terror the next morning. We did not have that problem in 2007.

There is an imbalance between security and the fundamental rights violated under this legislation. There is the case of Mr. Arar, who was deported to Syria where he was tortured. That is the epitome of stupidity. Everyone agreed, and unfortunately, we have not learned our lesson. We had nothing to gain from sending that man to be tortured. He was not a terrorist. As the parliamentary secretary himself admitted, the problem is that this piece of legislation is so broad that it can be applied to people who are not suspected of terrorism in the slightest.

The NDP is against terrorism. We are so opposed to terrorism that we are against the Conservatives. They are the ones who create false fears and blow them out of proportion to punish Canadians for having rights and using them.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague's speech. I think all of us share the anger and frustration about people who would abuse our country and put people's lives at risk and, in doing so, undermine basic protections and freedoms that all Canadians enjoy. Certainly, we want to ensure that, when people are caught, the full weight of the law is thrown against them.

However, I think what we are looking at here is this undermining of basic rights that make us the democracy we are.

We know that the Liberal Party brought in two very controversial motions in 2001, taking away the basic right of people to protect themselves in court, by forcing them to give testimony against themselves and also by holding people without charge.

The Liberals knew this was so contentious that they brought in a sunset clause. However, now, they are hiding behind the Conservatives and supporting getting rid of that sunset clause and bringing the legislation back.

Bill S-7 would be a law of general application, so it would affect minors as well as adults. There would be no differentiation in the people who could be held: friends, relatives, anybody related to someone who is supposedly suspected but not charged. It would include children. Both the Conservatives and the Liberals refuse to amend the act to clarify that people under the age of 17 or 18 would not be detained in this same measure.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague why, given that Canada has signed specific UN conventions on protecting children, this huge breach of basic rights for children would be allowed in what the Conservatives have called their desire to have the wide sweep of powers to go after anyone they want.