Public Safety Committee on Oct. 17th, 2016

[Brian Sproule, As an Individual]

First of all, I'm proud to say I was one of those people picketing outside here against Bill C-51. The working group to oppose Bill C-51 was established shortly after the introduction of that bill into Parliament. At that time, we said to “stop” Bill C-51; after its adoption, we changed it to “appeal” Bill C-51.

It's our view, and it always has been, that there is no place for this kind of legislation in Canada. It is police state legislation. It has nothing to do with security or opposing terrorism.

This kind of legislation, which was introduced by the Conservatives and supported by the Liberals, has also been brought in by various allies of the United States in Europe and other parts of the world.

The United States is the biggest source of terrorism internationally and inside the United States. Right from the early days of the labour movement in the United States, terrorist methods have been used to suppress worker strikes, to kill, assassinate, or lay trumped-up charges against union leaders. The black people of the United States have been subject to lynchings, mass murder, and what we see today going on with police murders with impunity.

This is the kind of government, the United States...and then, of course, internationally with the destabilization of various governments, and the organization of coups throughout Latin America over the last several dozen years. The United States is the only country that ever dropped nuclear weapons in time of war, and so on. The false accusation of weapons of mass destruction was used in Iraq to attempt to justify the invasion there. The accusations against Gadhafi, and now Assad, and on and on, all these are pretexts to launch invasions and to bring about regime change.

If we want to put an end to terrorism, Canada can make a contribution by immediately withdrawing from NATO and breaking with the U.S. military industrial complex.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Michael Burnside.

[Michael Burnside, As an Individual]

Hello. Thank you for holding this. I'm very confident you would see a lot more people here if there was more advance notice. I'm really grateful to everybody who did show up. I thank all of you. I only heard about this today.

I think the whole premise of Bill C-51 is based on the idea that we're under threat of terrorism, which I think is ludicrous on its face in the first place. I think the whole thing is based on the fact that we went in on this aggressive military act in the Middle East following the U.S., and it was a mistake, and as a result we drew aggression towards us. The fact that we have this bill now to try to combat something that we drew upon ourselves, and overreaches what is necessary and what is sane, is ludicrous.

Whatever kind of demographic you may ascribe to me personally in terms of age or gender, I want you to understand that I'm representing everybody I know, because there's not a single person who supports this. This bill is poison. It's completely useless. It's far over the top. We're not under threat of terrorism.

I support a full repeal. I don't think you can pick and choose. I don't think it's adequate. I don't think it accurately addresses the actual concerns that we have going forward in the future. All the wonderful points by the people brought out from OpenMedia are absolutely accurate. You cannot guarantee the security of devices when you build in back doors. You can't have laws in Canada where you can lock up people who do peaceful environmental protests. You can't do that. We're not going to support this, and we're going to continue fighting to have a full repeal.

There's not one of us. Is there anybody here who is in support of Bill C-51? What is the ratio of people you have met who support this versus those who do not? I mean real people, not friends, not family, but constituents. I've never met a single person in Canada or abroad who supports Bill C-51.

That's it. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Are there any questions?

Thank you.

Kathryne Ayres.

[Kathryne Ayres, As an Individual]

I'm not very well prepared because I only found out about the hearings this morning and I've been working all day.

I want to speak about the issue of accountability and the lack of expert oversight...CSEC, CSIS, the RCMP, all of the agencies working together as they would under Bill C-51, and as they have been.

I'm fairly new to understanding the importance of intelligence in making a country safe because, as many people of my background, politics has not been in the forefront. Once I started learning about what was really happening in Canada, I became very alarmed. What really opened up my eyes was the layoff of Eva Plunkett. She was the inspector general of CSIS, and Mr. Harper laid her off with no excuse, other than he wanted to save a million dollars. He would save a million dollars by laying her off. Well, officially she retired, but he closed the department. That was expert oversight of CSIS.

All that was left were Mickey Mouse SIRC committees with questionable leaders, one who actually was working for an oil company, Chuck Strahl. I have lost all trust that our spy agency CSIS is really working the way it should.

One of the reasons that Eva Plunkett was let go is because she was critical of CSIS. She provided reports that raised questions that were not taken very willingly by the government at the time.

We've had four years without expert oversight of our spy agency. We talk about Bill C-51 and all the problems there—and are there ever a lot of problems. Nobody is even talking about the fact that nobody is really looking after CSIS, and that's one major cog in this wheel.

I want to know if the Trudeau government is going to reinstate the inspector general office; if they are going to respectfully request the services of Eva Plunkett, who was extremely knowledgeable about what was going on there; and if they can be on top of looking at the problems in Bill C-51, of looking at what's really been going on over the past four years.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm afraid we're not the people to ask that question to, but certainly the whole issue of expert oversight is part of our mandate. The actual person, or the office, or the way it's done may be somebody else's, but we certainly take that as advice.

[Kathryne Ayres]

Are there questions?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Any questions?

[Kathryne Ayres]

Does nobody else find it very important that our spy agency is not being held accountable?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I certainly saw nodding among members on our committee as you were talking.

[Kathryne Ayres]

I'm scared. I think that Bill C-51 is dangerous. It's going to be used as an excuse to do things that Canadians don't really want to see done in the name of protection, but it's actually for a certain kind of misuse of power.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you.

Stephen Ellis.

[Stephen Ellis, As an Individual]

Hi. I appreciate your time and the chance to be here.

I'm a private citizen. I'm now retired. I used to work for each of the largest telephone companies in Canada. I had dealings with CSIS. They always needed a warrant. Of course, I've been retired for a while.

I'd ask the committee to remember why CSIS was created. CSIS was created because it was seen that it was really dangerous to have a police agency that had intelligence power. CSIS was created as a separate entity to take that away from the RCMP. Bill C-51 gives police powers back to CSIS. If you don't see why that is dangerous, then you really need to do some reading. You need to understand what all the privacy commissioners in Canada have said and why they oppose this bill.

Right from the start they opposed this bill. A couple of hundred legal academics opposed it. Almost every other former prime minister opposed it. The only people that I could see who were for it were the spooks and the people in the Harper government who saw a chance to take advantage of a terrible incident and bring in these really draconian powers on the part of CSIS.

I have a couple of suggestions. One suggestion is that if you want more information about the danger of trying to put back doors into encryption, then take a look at the writings of Dr. Bruce Schneier. He has a much-read blog. He's a very well-respected part of the information security community. He's at Schneier.com. You'll get a lot of really good information there about the dangers of trying to put back doors into encryption and why it's a danger to our economy to do that. If you removed encryption, then many businesses would fail.

Another suggestion I have is about this idea of CSIS going before a judge to get a warrant. Although it doesn't appear to be happening, that's very troubling. When CSIS does go before a judge to get a warrant, there's nobody representing the other side. CSIS on their own makes the decision of whether they should go for a warrant. Then they're the only ones presenting information to the judge. I think you need to involve the privacy commissioners or somebody like that to provide a counterbalance for what CSIS is requesting.

The privacy commissioners are a resource in the country that I think you're not utilizing. Your government is not utilizing that resource with respect to CSIS.

I can go on for a long time, but I don't think we have much more time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thanks very much.

Any questions?

We made notes.

Letchumanapihai Pathmayohan.

[Letchumanapihai Pathmayohan, As an Individual]

My name is Letchumanapihai Pathmayohan. Thanks for the opportunity to come here to speak. I saw this today in the newspaper so I thought of coming after I read about it.

As for the reason I'm here, I have been here in Canada for more than a quarter-century. I came from a war-torn country. I should say now that there's genocide in that country against Tamil people. When Bill C-51 came to be implemented, before that, what was happening in our community is that we were unable to bring our political matters, political issues, to the mainstream media or to the Canadian policy-makers, because we became like [Inaudible—Editor] We didn't know how to express that to the Canadian government, the policy-makers, the decision-makers, or the embassy, and we always were seeing scary things and fear tactics. We couldn't speak and we couldn't tell the truth.

When we came here, we thought that Canada had such freedom of speech and freedom of assembly all over the country. I really appreciate the Charter of Rights of Canada, which we don't have back home in my old country. We don't have any human rights there, and there is no Amnesty International. We came from that kind of country. We came here and our sovereignty.... We are free to bring these matters to the politicians, the decision-makers.

All of it it is under threat from all the terrorists, so we are going to be afraid to come forward and speak out. The majority went into the closet, even the educators and economic intelligentsia; they all went quietly. Mostly, it's keep your mouth shut. They want to go to work and they don't want to talk about these things. That disappears. The scary part is to speak out. That's what I am here to tell the committee. We had to work politically, in a political manner, and how did we want to bring it if we had this kind of a fear thing? Also, it brings the freedom fighters. The terrorists came, and they never consulted with the community people or the members in a due process as to whether it was the right thing they were doing or wrong. The people were defenceless, because we came from a troubled country. That sense of [Inaudible—Editor] does not exist here, I believe.

In Toronto, they have a lot of communities, quite a few. There is a large number of Tamil communities, but in Vancouver, we are all scattered. We are quite a few, I guess. That's what my sense of it is. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Are there any questions?

Robert Feher.

[Robert Feher, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I only found out about this today, so I didn't have much time to research. I quickly googled this before I got here to figure out as much as I could and to be as informed as possible. I didn't come for the meeting beforehand [Inaudible—Editor].

There were a few things that I thought were really weird about Bill C-51. One was that the agency in charge of overviewing them and making sure they do everything right, which I think was SIRC or something like that—the Security Intelligence Review Committee, if I recall correctly—said that before they even got policing powers, CSIS, they had trouble overviewing them and making sure they were doing everything right. There were some things going on that were kind of like, oh, you shouldn't be doing that. Now that they have a lot of policing power that's very vaguely defined so that they can do not everything they want against terrorism, but almost anything, then there's not going to be a lot of oversight in making sure they're doing things properly and not overstepping their boundaries, which is bad.

The second thing is about the no-fly list. I found out that to be put on the no-fly list there's not really very much of a requirement, other than I think “reasonable grounds to suspect” someone. To get off the no-fly list involves going to court, but the court proceedings can be held in secret, so the person who wants to get off the no-fly list, the public, and that person's lawyer can't hear the evidence about why CSIS says no, to keep them on the no-fly list. You could say “why am I on the no-fly list?”, and you could say that you want to repeal that. You go to court, court happens, and the judge says, “Okay, I've heard the evidence and I've made my decision, and you just stay on the no-fly list.” When you ask why, they say they can't tell you because that's secret. That's kind of shady. That's really weird.

Those are my concerns. That's about all.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Are there any questions?

Those two issues, the oversight issue and the—

[Robert Feher]

—no-fly list—

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

—are certainly on our agenda.

Thank you for raising them.

Minah Lee.

[Minah Lee, As an Individual]

First of all, I am a guest in this land, and I am a non-citizen, non-PR, who has been living here for a decade. I acknowledge that I am in the first place excluded from the consideration and from the conversation by being non-Canadian. At the same time, I'm deeply concerned by this whole issue and I have been following it since I am living here.

I'm also an artist, and I have been prevented from gaining more legal or political ground in this land by being an artist, because that isn't really in line with the economic security that the nation is going for.

A few years ago, I made a piece of artwork focusing on the lone wolf terrorist and also the online predator issues, which I was dealing with after some public shows. Then what happened is, unfortunately, I experienced some incidents that were violating my privacy very profoundly. Then I realized that the existence of this anti-terrorism bill might account for this unexplained act of destruction.

I'm here to talk about the goal of the imagination that is implicated in this law. I have actually become very interested in this issue since then. I saw a video of the Minister of Public Safety talking about the lone wolf terrorist issue, defending against the criticism of Bill C-51. He said the copycat mentality is very dangerous and we have to go to the roots of these people and disrupt them. I couldn't quite grasp what that really meant and it gave me a deep chill actually.

I couldn't stop thinking that it is the law that proves the state's privilege to imagine and to impose the imagined narrative on people at the risk of their actual safety and freedom of mobility and freedom of expression. My biggest concern is that this logic is being normalized and perpetrated while the group of people who are the most vulnerable and unprotected and barred from their legal rights are being kept from and excluded from the issues of the rights and their actual safety as this issue of nationalism is being perpetrated in a binary way, of Canadians and non-Canadians. I'm also speaking on behalf of all the people who are racially discriminated against and who have to go through that in their life. That was my argument.

Also, I recently saw a diagram showing the threat level of terrorism. As many who have spoken previously said, many people do not agree with this law. This diagram was designed for people like me who don't really have enough time to go through the long letters of the laws. It very simply described medium and low and high levels of threats and showed that Canada's threat level was medium. It's almost like this kitchen science logic that is easy for people to understand and keeps trying to convince people who don't really agree with it.

I'm just questioning this normal imagination or convincing process of creating those contents to convince people who are not really agreeing with this law.

Thank you, and thank you for having my voice heard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you.

William Easterbrook. Okay.

Joseph Theriault.

[Joseph Theriault, As an Individual]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you.

We have one more person on the list, and that's Rukshana Homi.

[Rukshana Homi, As an Individual]

Good evening.

I didn't know about this until the last minute, and hence my comments may be a bit scattered. Like many, many people have mentioned here, a lot of people are strongly against Bill C-51, and yet very, very few...I don't know of anybody who knew about this. I just found out literally today.

There's an elephant in the room, an elephant that almost never gets addressed. It has to be addressed. May I ask, please, all of you here who I'm addressing, how many of you know what a false flag operation is? Could I ask that you raise your hand so I could know?