Thank you for the question.
I think the bill itself—or rather, the law now—was so fundamentally flawed that whatever redeeming qualities it might have had were outweighed by the flaws. I usually use this example. If I bought a house that had a crumbling foundation, I wouldn't throw a few coats of paint on and say, “Let's keep this.” I'd say, “Let's start again.”
Let's go through some of the essential elements of Bill C-51.
The CSIS provisions give CSIS secret disruption powers to essentially disrupt people's lives and take actions that could result in disasters, as Mr. Kapoor said. They are a non-starter in a democracy. Things could happen to people, and they would never have legal recourse. They happen in secret. They would never see the light of day.
In a criminal context, police get warrants and they do have secret wiretaps, but ultimately it sees the light of day. You have a day in court. That's essentially our system. When the state acts against you, you have the right to defend yourself. When CSIS acts against you under these disruption warrants, you will never know and you will never have the right to defend yourself. Whether you're guilty or innocent, you won't have a shot to defend yourself.
Let's talk about promoting and advocating terrorism. First of all, the definitions in there are loose to begin with. The Criminal Code already has always had counselling offences, so when you're involved in criminal activity and encouraging it, you can be caught.
The Anti-terrorism Act, 2001 introduced criminalized actions that were removed from action, such as facilitating terrorism or encouraging someone to start committing a terrorist act. I had critiques about that, but it was still close enough to the act. In criminal law, what you want is to criminalize the act. Terrorism is essentially violent acts. They want to kill someone, so let's say it's killing someone. If I facilitate you to do that by encouraging you, giving you money, talking to you, I can be caught there. As a democratic society, we want to capture the act or something close to the act. If we get far from the act, we're starting to stray from our criminal law and democratic principles and we're starting to criminalize speech. What I learned in law school is that you don't pass redundant laws.
In the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015 we already had facilitating, which is close to the act. Then this must be something further removed from that, so now we're getting very close to criminalizing speech. I'm not saying I support people who say things that encourage terrorism. Of course, we all condemn that, but we live in a society where we tolerate some of that offensive speech.
The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act amendments in Bill C-51 essentially rolled it back, and Mr. Kapoor can speak to this in more detail because he is a special advocate. The Charkaoui decision said that in the security certificate process, secret proceedings where a judge sat alone with a CSIS lawyer were essentially unconstitutional. They introduced special advocates to represent the interests of the named party on the security certificate. Bill C-51 essentially rolls that back. IRPA was amended to say that the special advocates don't have access to all the information. It kind of undoes what the Supreme Court has told us.
Those are three pieces of it.
Let's talk about the no-fly list. We can debate till the cows come home whether no-fly lists—