I'm Joseph Theriault. I'm a long-time political activist and a candidate for the Marxist-Leninist Party in New Westminster—Burnaby in the federal elections. I would like to bring up the issue that, as you can hear, many people do not have faith in the process of consultations, both on this issue and on many other issues that the Liberals are using. If you recall the federal election, a major part of the election was opposition to Bill C-51. The Liberals during the election had promised that they would immediately pass legislation to put into place oversight and accountability on the bill, and as this is the first anniversary of their coming to power, there's been no sign of that.
The reference to oversight has disappeared, and they're now talking about evaluations. The committee they're proposing to evaluate are going to be sworn to secrecy, and they can't give any information on things they know, so we have people who can only evaluate. If they evaluate and find out anything, then they aren't able to share it with the Canadian polity, which is, you could say, a part of a police state situation.
The green paper they published doesn't talk about security and rights, but it diverts the whole discussion to the question of combatting extremist terrorism and using that to say they need to have exceptional measures outside the rule of law to be able to make it safe. They want to enact this impunity supposedly in the name of defending us, but when you come down to it, what we will have left is a government.... They're trying to say that after this legislation, we'll have a government of laws, but we're left with unfettered police powers that remain for any of the former public authorities. I'm very concerned.
This process is eliminating the accountability of the government to the Canadian public. We're asked to be able to trust these guys, but without any information, and they are allowed to carry on.
I'm 70 years old, and I was active in the sixties and seventies when the War Measures Act was brought in. As life unfolded, evidence came out that you had agents operating within the FLQ, with people like Corporal Samson, etc. You had the RCMP violating laws, burning bridges, burning barns, and disrupting political movements. This was indeed the rationale for the creation of CSIS, to separate those powers. That's all gone aside, you have very small consultations, and supposedly these emails and twitters are counted as feedback. Basically, it's a fraud. We need to have the bill repealed, and we need to have the question of national security dealt with by empowering the people to be able to make their police force and the government accountable, which is the opposite of what we have now.