He certainly did say it and it's on the record. Anyone who goes back to the committee evidence will see that he did say he would have been able to prosecute the Ottawa shooter, whose name I specifically do not use. I try to make it a practice never to use the names of those who commit violent acts because many of them seek to become famous. If we use any names, I would urge all my colleagues to use the names of victims and not the names of those shooters.
The second part of this section deals with the warrant procedure for terrorist propaganda on the Internet. Again, it's controversial. It's not a simple thing to say you're going to take things down from the Internet. I have to note that we had a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that allowed hate materials to be taken off the Internet by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. All the members on the government side in 2013 supported eliminating that power of the Human Rights Commission to take out hate-filled materials. Now, here we are inserting it back into this section.
I think the two biggest problems here, starting with the vague nature of the offence, is also the use of the word “reckless”, implying that people may be caught in this who had no intention of supporting or advocating terrorism. There are a good many experts who argue that we ought not to take down terrorist propaganda and that it's very useful to the police and enforcement if people are posting things, so that they can find them and go after them. If you take down all the propaganda and drive them underground, they're much more difficult to bring to justice. We have the example of the attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo, where those who perpetrated that attack went dark on the Internet for two years before they committed that offence. They did that purposely to make it very difficult for law enforcement to find them.
Finally, we make it difficult for all those who are working in deradicalization if we remove all of the material in advance, again, to find context and counter those materials. When we get to report stage, we will be moving an amendment, as recommended by the Canadian Bar Association and many others, to delete this section in its totality. That does not mean that we in any way support those who counsel the commission of terrorist act. That's already illegal in the Criminal Code. For those reasons we did not support any of the amendments that tried to improve the section, because we believe it is truly unfixable and it will not make a contribution to making Canadians safer. It may hamper those efforts to make Canadians safer at the same time as it produces a chill on freedom of speech in this country.