My name is Sameer Zuberi. I'm with the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations. We are an Ottawa-based advocacy group that works nationally across the country, with representatives from Montreal to Vancouver. We have worked on a number of different issues, from the Arar inquiry to security certificates to, in Quebec, the reasonable accommodation issue. These are the types of cases we work on.
We work on a national level on campaigns that people know about, such as the certificate, and we also work on smaller, unknown campaigns and unknown cases that never actually go to the press.
I want to thank everybody in this committee for listening to us. I'm sure you have to spend a lot of time to do this all the time, and it's not necessarily an easy thing to do.
I also want to thank you for giving us the opportunity because I know that at first you wanted to go quickly through this, so that you could get the legislation enacted, which is a fair and responsible thing to do. I also want to thank you for taking the time to hear from us because, while there are serious concerns that we have as a council, there are also other individuals who have serious concerns.
I want to preface what I'm about to say by first saying that I believe we Canadians and Canada should be strong on terrorism. There is zero tolerance for terrorists, and we must prosecute them and ensure that such acts are not allowed to occur. That has always been our position.
At the same time, we cannot throw out human rights just because we are trying to find terrorists.
What we need to do, and what we are seeking to do, is to find a balance between finding people who actually do crimes and protecting the rights of individuals so that they are not thrown into jail when they have not committed any, or when we cannot prove they have committed something. I want to preface what I'm about to say with that.
We're here to discuss today the special advocate. We have looked at the case of security certificates historically as one that is very important for the Muslim community in Canada. It's one that today the Muslim community, which numbers 2% of this country, is very heavily looking at and is constantly aware of. We're watching it on a daily basis. If you talk about it with people on the streets, they know about it; it's something people are following.
What's happening in this room is important to people in this country. The statistics came out the other day that 20% of Canadians are foreign-born, and these 20% of Canadians look towards issues like the security certificate as a litmus test of whether or not the government listens to the concerns of newly landed people.
In terms of the certificate and Bill C-3, we think that the security certificate should have criminal standards. I'm not going to say that the security certificate should not be under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, but what I will say is that if we keep it under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, what we should look towards is inserting criminal standards within it so that people know what they're up against. We can keep it in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act; that's just fine. But let's insert those criminal standards so that people can see the evidence against them. That is only fair.
I was sitting here the other day when Warren Allmand was giving his presentation, and he made a very valid point. He said we don't want to be deporting people who we feel are serious threats to other countries, because that in the end will not be responsible of us as Canadians, but will give our responsibility to the rest of the world. Because we now live in an increasingly global society, what happens here at home affects other parts of the world and vice versa; therefore, if we don't address the issues responsibly here in Canada, they may just come to bite us later on, in the future. We certainly don't want that.
The special advocate system does not resolve the question involving certificates of a two-tiered justice system, wherein we have two standards of justice, one for immigrants and another for citizens. This is certainly not fair; it is not equitable; it is un-Canadian. This is something that, if we in this room were subject to it, we would certainly not appreciate.
The special advocate amendments do not lead to a resolution of the questions on indefinite detention and deportation to torture. For us at the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, these are two very valid points, two that we still need to look at and are of concern to us.
Indefinite detention cannot be allowed. It's something that is not just. And deportation to torture is abhorrent and is something that we, as Canadians, cannot allow. Why? Because people around the world look to us for standards in terms of how to create their own legislation. They look to us to see how they should be implementing their policies, and if we will allow deportation to torture, other countries will follow suit. They will follow our model.
Finally, I'd like to close on whether a point of evidence being brought forth in the security certificate process has been addressed responsibly in Bill C-3. Bill C-3 still allows for secret evidence to be brought forth. Yes, you now have another individual who comes and looks at the information. However, whether this individual can actually vet this information thoroughly is a major question. There is no back and forth process between the special advocate and the named individual. That is a concern. How can the special advocate actually see that the information is correct, sound, and accurate if he or she cannot dialogue with the named person?
What we saw in the Arar commission, with the most recently released documentation, was that national security claims were used to hold back embarrassing information that would basically have shown that national security agencies made a mistake. Who is to say that the special advocate process will not lead to the same sort of occurrence: it will be said that something cannot be released due to national security concerns only because it would embarrass CSIS or the RCMP if it were divulged to the public?
We saw recently the taser incident, which, while unrelated to security certificates, really showed that when evidence is brought forth openly and people get a chance to evaluate what's there, we can actually come to the truth. If this passenger had not taken his video camera and start recording, would we have known today that this person, the Polish man, actually did not fight back against officers? Maybe not. Maybe we would have accepted the story that was given to us. But now, because of the actual evidence having been brought forth and because of people seeing it, we were able to come to the truth. In the end, that makes us a better country and that makes us more responsible and better able to deal with the issues.
In terms of balancing human rights and the need to prosecute real, serious criminals, we must look at that seriously. But if we are really to eliminate terrorism in this country and around the world, we need to do so in a just and equitable way. Otherwise, we will not address the issues and we'll not be able to get to the heart of the problem.
I'll close on that. This is a very important concern for Canadian Muslims and for immigrants in general in this country.