Thank you.
Mr. Segal, I want to be an equal opportunity questioner here. As you know, I have huge respect for you. I sought your advice on occasion and appreciated it. I'm glad to see that you in general feel that the bill is helpful and appropriate.
I have to say I was a little surprised by your criticisms of the bill and I'd like to give you a chance a talk about that. You talked about the bill being possibly rapidly drafted as new law. I joined this committee in September. At that time we were told that a bill to give better tools to our security agencies to protect against terrorist acts was in the works. Here we are now, six months later, on committee study of the bill. There has to be a third reading of the bill in the House, and as you know as a former senator the whole process is repeated in the Senate. We'll be fortunate to have the bill passed into law by summer. It will be almost a year, so it seems to me this is hardly a knee-jerk reaction by any means.
You also mentioned that the interruptions by the security forces could operate outside the provision and protections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Isn't that what warrants always do? If you want a wiretap, for example, you have to get a warrant because it's not normally a lawful activity. It's also fair to say that the protections of the charter are not unlimited. Did you know that section 51 talks about charter protections that are subject to the limits that can be demonstrably justified and demonstrated in society? We already have activities by security that deal with charter rights and how they can be properly balanced to ensure security.
You talked about provisions that might make us resemble those we are struggling to defeat. We're struggling to defeat an entity that slaughters entire communities based on their religious affiliation, that takes women and sells them as chattels, that believes that enslavement of populations is legitimate, that indulges in crucifixions by the hundreds and thousands, and that taxes the remaining survivors to the point where they lose all of their personal property and their ability to provide even the most basic necessities of life for themselves and their families.
I'm curious as to how you believe that any provisions of this bill might in any way make us resemble the entities we're struggling to defeat. It seems to me there's such a lack of proportionality in that comment that I struggle with its relevance.