As the committee will hear in more detail today, the concern is that this law makes no exemption for.... Unlike the definition of terrorist activity in the current Anti-terrorism Act, the bill now only provides exemption for lawful protest. I think that, as our colleagues at Greenpeace and as Professors Roach and Forcese have indicated, this is just far too broad. It captures all sorts of peaceful, non-violent protects that may simply be running afoul of a municipal bylaw: they may not have a proper permit—that sort of thing.
We have heard discussion about, for example, this not being what this law is meant to target; that it's not really meant to go after the Raging Grannies or kids who are protesting without a permit. But I think this approach—and this is something we set out in our brief—really threatens to politicize what ought to be an objective assessment of security. It makes quite subjective what constitutes a true security threat vis-à-vis what isn't a true security threat.
For the politically active, this is quite concerning, because whether their conduct were to be considered as something that undermines the security of Canada might simply turn on whether their cause is politically popular or not. In our view, that's quite dangerous for freedom of expression and for the right to dissent. We take the view that the better approach would be to adopt the definition contained in the Criminal Code, which explicitly exempts from the definition of terrorist activity all advocacy, all protest, all dissent, and stoppage of work.