Public Safety Committee on Oct. 17th, 2016

[The Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant (Don Valley West, Lib.)), Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

My name is Rob Oliphant, member of Parliament for Don Valley West, and I am the Chair of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

Welcome to this public meeting of our committee.

This is the travelling version of our 10-member committee. We have members representing the Liberal Party of Canada, the New Democratic Party, as well as the Conservative Party of Canada. We are travelling across the country to hear people's thoughts and ideas about the national security framework.

Both English and French will be used in this committee's meeting.

You can get headsets for interpretation because we will be respecting both languages.

This afternoon, and each afternoon in the five cities that we've chosen, we have been listening to experts who have worked in this area of national security. They've been advising our committee with their thoughts and ideas, and we had a chance to question them this afternoon.

Tomorrow, we'll be in Calgary, on Wednesday in Toronto, on Thursday in Montreal, and then Friday, we'll be in Halifax.

We began our committee hearings in Ottawa two weeks ago. This is the on-the-road version, and we will continue studying the topic when we get back to Ottawa, listening to more experts and receiving briefs and written submissions that Canadians want to give us.

The government itself is also undertaking consultations regarding national security. This is separate from that. This is a parliamentary committee, and people often confuse Parliament and government as though we're one and the same. We are not. This parliamentary committee is independent of government, and will advise government through Parliament on measures we think are important to Canadians that should be taken into account by the executive branch of the government.

The government is undertaking a similar consultation and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness issued a green paper, as well as a backgrounder on national security. That forms part of our consultation, but it isn't our full consultation. Our consultation can be as wide as we want to make it, and it can take therefore as long as.... We're not exactly sure how long it's going to take right now.

The minister has asked us to provide some advice to him through Parliament before the year's end, which we will attempt to do; however, our work will continue, I am sure, for quite a while in the area of national security as we attempt to find a way to ensure that Canadians are kept safe, and our rights and freedoms are safeguarded. It is a balancing of keeping Canadians safe through the best options and tools for our national security agencies, but at the same time ensuring that we have the rights of Canadians safeguarded.

Tonight, we have two hours to meet as a committee with you, and we're going to suggest that this is your meeting, not ours. We will be speaking only a little. People will be invited to go to the microphone, and I'm going to suggest about three minutes per person.

The committee may or may not have questions of individual members. I will be watching the committee members to see if any of them would like to ask the questioner for elaboration, or perhaps some clarification of what was said.

We would ask that when you come to the mike, you identify yourself. If you would like to also indicate any organization that you're part of, you may do so, but you don't have to. That's a way for us to understand how broadly and how deeply Canadians are concerned about these issues.

We don't have any opening remarks from the committee other than to say thank you for engaging in this conversation. It's important that Parliament be an open body, and we're glad that you are here to share your thoughts. I can guarantee you that your opinions will indeed shape the report that the committee eventually makes to Parliament.

I'm going to introduce our committee before we begin. Actually, I'll have you introduce yourselves.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Pam Damoff, I'm the MP for Oakville North—Burlington.

[Marco Mendicino, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

Marco Mendicino, member of Parliament for Eglinton—Lawrence.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Larry Miller, member of Parliament for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, in Ontario.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Dianne Watts, a member of Parliament for South Surrey—White Rock.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

My name is Matthew Dubé, and I am the member for the riding of Beloeil—Chambly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm assisted by the clerk, the analysts, and a number of other officials who help us do our committee work.

We're going to begin with John Allen West.

[John West, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name name is John Allen West. I represent the rather obscure but intelligent unit in Canada called the caretaker movement. The caretaker movement was set up some years ago after I realized that appealing to any branch of government on matters of intelligence was not going to produce any results.

In other words, I think we should all think carefully about what we mean by intelligence, and, whether we are collecting it or not, how that intelligence will be applied. I was under the impression when I came here that in fact that you had some jurisdiction or structure to pass on the information that we were giving you. It appears that you're just another shill event—I regret to say that—of parties that are simply playing adversarial games with one another and are not seriously looking after the best interests of the Canadian people.

I'm going to take you back briefly to 1972. In 1972, I was doing work for the CBC, and in the course of my investigations for stories, I came across the fact that Mr. Trudeau, the elder now passed, was engaging in discussing behaviour that made him available to blackmail. As a result of that blackmail, he gave away the Bank of Canada to international banking corruptions—corporations, they call themselves.

This piece of information I took to the then Governor General at that time, Roland Michener, and to the deputy commissioner in charge of criminal investigation, by the name of.... I'll give you his name in a moment. Those two gentlemen sent the police around and asked what kind of a crazy Englishman—because I was then and am now—was reporting on such matters.

I was actually educated to such matters. I grew up in an intelligence community in Great Britain. This is not a result of my paranoia. This is a result of my experience. I left my country at 23 because I was working then at the BBC as a systems analyst. It all sounds like something out of a spy novel, but it's true. The information that I was trying to get across then was, do not, Great Britain and the British people, get into bed with the Americans, because that is going to bring on neo-colonialism and misery in the world.

Now, I'm old enough to have lived through the Second World War. I can tell you front up, it's not a very pleasant experience for children. Canada, when I came to this country, was a peacemaker. In the world, it was known as a peacemaking country. It was not until later that I saw that this was all part of a larger older scheme developed by Zionist international bankers to bring about chaos in the Middle East.

That is what happened. When I spoke up about that in the various areas of the BBC, I was certainly shut down very quickly, as I'm about to be now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you, Mr. West.

[John West]

Thank you is the answer I always get.

I only have one question. If you have shut off the mike, well fine. I have it on my recorder. I hope this will go down in history. It's clearly evident that you have no jurisdiction, no value, no purpose, and you're just blindsiding the Canadian people for legitimate good government.

I ask you only one question at this point. Kindly, kindly describe for yourself the status quo and see how much longer such a corrupted government, such a corrupted industrial base, can go on, and this country fall further behind into slavery.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you, Mr. West.

[John West]

Thank you for your time. I cannot thank you for your patience because you have none. If intelligence does not involve patience, then you're not an intelligent man.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you, Mr. West.

Thank you.

Alnoor Gova.

[Alnoor Gova, As an Individual]

Thank you.

First, I want to acknowledge where we're gathered. We're gathered on unceded Coast Salish territory. It's very important to recognize where we are.

Anti-terrorism cases invariably breach normative legal parameters. First of all, let me just say that I'm a radio broadcaster and also a scholar of the contemporary situation of Muslims being targeted in Canada. My Ph.D. research was on the interpretation of responses to Islamophobia by these targeted communities themselves in 2015. These anti-terrorism cases invariably breach normative legal parameters. They venture into a state where we really argue how it should be? We know that in Canada there are cases of violence committed by domestic groups, such as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and others. What I really want to ask is why are these not considered in public safety when we talk about national security, for example? We know also that, statistically, cases that involve this kind of terrorism in Europe, in the United States, and in Canada do not have Muslims as the primary perpetrators of that violence. I can follow up and give you all the pieces of this later because [Inaudible—Editor] this information. Why the focus on Muslims? Why is it that we really don't have substantive evidence that Muslims are perpetrating this violence? Yes, the RCMP and CSIS in their internal records have identified that threats to Canada are coming from groups such as the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Why that is not a public safety concern is the question.

There is a long answer to it that you may or may not like, but it is because we still envision a [Inaudible—Editor] state that we call Canada. This is why we have racial profiling. This is why we have carding going on in places such as Toronto. This is why Muslims are being targeted and why we're going to eventually strip all Canadians of their civil liberties. This is why the BCCLA that was here earlier, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Privacy Commissioner, the past Prime Minister, etc., came out when the Conservatives were pushing this bill to say that this is not good for Canada. So the question becomes, again, why are you focusing on a small minority of people who are perpetrating these acts and blowing it out of proportion, when you have groups in Canada like the neo-Nazis and white supremacists?

Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS investigator, noted that between 2001 and 2012 there were 30 bombings that happened in Canada. None of them were perpetrated by Muslims. I don't hear Public Safety coming out and talking about such a thing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

I don't know whether anybody on the committee....

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Mr. Chair, I'm not going to speak on behalf of the committee, but I think the committee will agree with me. I want it on record that while I'm not part of the present government, I am a member of Parliament, and I will defend the present government and the fact that they are not targeting Muslims. None of us, I believe, around this table or in this room are for that. We target anybody, any group, including the neo-Nazis, if they perpetrate terrorism. That needs to be on the record.

[Alnoor Gova]

All right, sir, you're on the record.

A quick response to that is the previous government, when the Valentine's Day massacre hoax happened in Halifax.... Do you remember that, sir? Does anybody around the table remember that? Does anybody here remember that? Okay, so at least one person reads the media.

MacKay said that there was a neo-Nazi group that was planning to shoot up some mall down in Halifax just last year. MacKay was the minister of whatever he was at the time, and he said that, oh, no, no, this is not terrorism, this is just “murderous misfits”. [Inaudible—Editor]. So that's going on. When this is being excused, that's not fair, sir. So there is targeting.

Plus there's a lot of work in Canadian scholarship criminology that has looked at racial profiling. I did a study myself in 2007 on racial profiling here, and it clearly showed that Muslims are being targeted. I'll send you that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you.

Just to clarify what we're about today. We are not from the government. Some of us are on the government side of the House, but we're not part of the government. The government is composed of the cabinet and officials who work with the government. We are here as Canadians to hear your concerns.

First, try to stick as closely as possible to the national security framework issues. Second, we won't be able to defend, and we're not going to defend, any actions by this government or previous governments. We're here to listen to what your concerns and priorities are for the future. That is within our mandate as parliamentarians.

We are, for better or worse, the House of Commons. That means we're the commons, and you're part of that, so we're here to listen to you. We won't defend any government actions. That's not our job.

Mr. Miller was absolutely correct, though, in saying that in this committee, we're attempting to advise the government on a national security framework that doesn't look at a particular threat or a particular right, but looks at all threats to public safety, and sees how we safeguard all rights of every Canadian, not some Canadians. That is our task.

Mr. Jamie May.

[Jamie May, As an Individual]

Thank you, Chairman.

I don't know what I'm going to speak to. I've got a couple of things here at the end.

The environment we find ourselves in these days is perhaps slightly overactive, which encourages a higher crime rate.

[Technical Difficulty—Editor]

We will move down the road. These algorithms, with which we'll be working with potentially, artificial super-intelligence, maybe very far down the line. This is a very careful thing that must be, as with any bill, future-proof. We have to think about these things before you get to them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

We have a question from Mr. Mendicino.

[Marco Mendicino, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

First of all, I want to thank you for your very thoughtful remarks, and to draw your attention to the CSIS Act, section 12.1, which addresses threat reduction measures, and to further clarify that the threshold, which you identified in your remarks, doesn't actually apply to threat reduction measures.

What the act says is that before the service takes any threat reduction measures, there must be reasonable and probable grounds that a particular activity constitutes a threat to national security. It's a slightly higher threshold than the one that you were referring to for the purposes of authorizing threat reduction measures. I just wanted to point that out.

Otherwise, thank you for your remarks.

[Jamie May]

I still think that threshold isn't too low and I would think that threshold has to be lowered. I think with our security services we already have the tools to do this job. I don't think we need more of these tools.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Barbara Taylor, you have three minutes. I've been a bit generous. I'm trying to be tighter.

[Barbara Taylor, As an Individual]

I would like to talk personally about why I feel less safe and less secure since Bill C-51 was passed. I can remember the 1970 War Measures Act in Montreal, and Bill C-51 strikes me as being like the War Measures Act full-time forever.

My first reaction was to ask for a definition of terrorism. Harper seemed to imply that it was anyone who disagreed with him. Reg Whitaker spoke earlier today about criminalizing a certain range of opinion, so that's a real concern.

Up to a year ago, I might have felt hesitant to even come out to a public consultation like this, but that's academic, because clearly there were no public consultations before C-51 was passed.

I wondered why new prisons were being constructed at a time when the crime rate was going down. Who would be filling them? Would environmentalists who opposed diluted bitumen pipelines be labelled terrorists and arrested and incarcerated? Would it be peace activists who did not welcome foreign misadventures or even the loss of the long-gun registry be arrested, or even those committed to non-violence, subject to infiltration by agents provocateursto justify arrest and detention? I'm thinking in particular about the G8 summit in Toronto. I heard some horror stories from those who were there. There were audits of NGOs that read like a who's who of the organizations that I support, the charities I support, including my own church.

I've been wondering just in the past week why the Trudeau government is reluctant to give up the inheritances of the Harper government. I've heard that, with regard to climate change, it has the same inadequate goals. I heard on CBC radio today about the same low levels of health care dollars going to the provinces. And now, why does it want to keep what was given to it with Bill C-51?

I have one last piece of personal disclosure, which is that I'm a Raging Granny. If we had had more notice, I wouldn't be the only one here today. We have a song that we were singing. I'll give you just two lines. It goes, “Don't spy on me, RCMP. This isn't Argentina.”

I have another song that I will leave with you along with a cartoon from the Vancouver Sun from 1998, which will show you that this has been going on since before 9/11 and before Bill C-51. When APEC was held here in Vancouver, the Raging Grannies were listed as a low-level threat. Now at the time, our response to that was “what do you mean 'low level'?” But since then, we're a little more nervous. I am. I'll only speak for myself.

I want to leave you with a song and a cartoon and an accompanying article. To whom should I give them, please?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm happy to take it.

Ms. Damoff has a question for you before you go.