Thank you very much. It's good to be with you today, particularly in the presence of my former professor of constitutional law, Irwin Cotler, who taught me 25 years ago.
Just for the record, I am a board member of the BC Civil Liberties Association, but that's not why I'm here today. I'm here because I was a member of the 2010 Olympics civil liberties advisory committee, which was an ad hoc group of retired judges, police officers, lawyers, and academics who worked directly with the City of Vancouver, with the RCMP-led integrated security unit, and with a number of protest groups in the lead-up to the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
The proposed legislation that you're considering today, Bill C-309, would obviously make two simple changes to the Criminal Code: amending section 35 to make it a criminal offence to wear a mask during a riot, and secondly, amending section 66 to also make it a criminal offence to wear a mask or other disguise when participating in an unlawful assembly.
During the Vancouver Olympics, I was proud to live in a country in which the expression of all political views is respected and protected, and during the riots that followed the Vancouver Canucks game seven Stanley Cup loss, I felt nothing but contempt for the criminals who were rampaging through our streets.
Those two sentiments are entirely consistent. In a democracy, there's a crucially important distinction between a protest and a riot. Almost all of the people involved in the Vancouver Olympics protests were there to express political concerns.
On riots, let me simply say—and others have said this before me—that the proposed amendment to section 35 seems redundant, since the Criminal Code already makes it an offence to wear a mask with the intent to commit an indictable offence. And obviously, participating in a riot is already an indictable offence. For this reason, my comments are directed solely at the second of the two proposed amendments, namely the creation of a new offence, punishable by up to five years in prison, for wearing a mask or disguise during an unlawful assembly.
Unfortunately, it is relatively easy for a peaceful protester to unintentionally find himself or herself involved in an unlawful assembly. The definition of an unlawful assembly in paragraph 63(1)(b) of the Criminal Code says that it is an assembly that causes
persons in the neighbourhood...to fear, on reasonable grounds that they
will by that assembly...provoke other persons to disturb the peace tumultuously.
This is hardly clear and definitive and is therefore open to subjective and controversial determinations by the police.
The matter is obviously complicated by the fact that some political protests include a small number of individuals who are intent on disturbing the peace tumultuously, and their ability to do so is sometimes facilitated by the presence of that much larger group of peaceful protesters. Clearly, some of that small number of individuals intent on disturbing the peace may wear masks or other disguises. But as Mr. Champ has pointed out, at the same time, some protesters who have absolutely no intent to disturb the peace tumultuously may also be wearing masks and be doing so for entirely legitimate reasons. This, I feel, is where the second part of Bill C-309 overreaches.
During the opening ceremonies for the Vancouver Olympics, I was observing a protest from a position roughly 10 metres away from the police line. I found myself standing beside a man who was wearing a balaclava. I seized the opportunity to engage him in conversation and gently suggested that he remove the mask. “You have nothing to fear”, I said. “You're not doing anything illegal.” He replied: “It's not the police who worry me. I work in an office where everyone is extremely supportive of the Olympics. If they see me here”— and at this point he pointed to the wall of TV cameras that were covering the protest—“I might lose my job.”
By that point the protest we were observing had probably become an unlawful assembly, meaning that the man I was speaking with, who had done nothing wrong, would fall within the scope of Bill C-309.
I should also say that the Vancouver Police Department handled that particular protest in a manner that casts valuable light on the proposed legislation before you. Entirely by design there was just a single row of VPD officers wearing baseball caps facing a crowd of 2,000 people. The police were friendly and smiling as they informed the protesters that their march could not continue into the stadium where the opening ceremonies were about to begin.
Almost all of the protesters accepted the limitation with grace, because the police had stopped traffic for them as they marched through downtown Vancouver and allowed them to come within 50 metres of the stadium and to chant and wave placards in clear sight and earshot of the ticket holders who were walking in.
A dozen masked people did try to pick a fight by spitting at the police and throwing traffic cones. The officers continued talking and smiling, the larger crowd remained calm, and the attempted riot fizzled out like a wet firework. The masked youths left in a sulk.
They came out the next morning without the presence of the larger surrounding crowd, broke a window at the HBC store, and were promptly arrested, to the satisfaction of not just the police but the thousands and thousands of peaceful protesters.
If the Vancouver Olympics can teach us anything, it's that the vast majority of protesters, if treated well, are the most valuable assets that security planners have. Well-intentioned protesters can exercise peer pressure on potential perpetrators of violence because they know that law-breaking can impede or distract from their message, if their message is in fact being allowed to get through.
Now, we shouldn't be surprised if—