Thank you very much.
I will read from my prepared statement.
Canada's history of attempting to balance human rights against internal security stretches back to the late 19th century when Prime Minister John A. Macdonald hired a number of undercover detectives to keep watch on the Fenians. During the First World War, the Canadian government gave itself powers under the War Measures Act to literally suspend traditional British freedoms by cancelling habeas corpus, jailing German and Austrian Canadians, engaging in widespread press censorship, and greatly expanding the external security services carried out by the North West Mounted Police, which is now the RCMP, and the military.
There was wide banning of radical or anti-war publications and passage of an act giving the government power to deport British subjects for radical activities. Spying on labour unions and radical political parties such as the Workers Party of Canada, which was the legal arm of the illegal Communist Party, continued in the interwar period and was ramped up after the start of the Great Depression when communist activities and labour organizations sparked fear in Ottawa that a communist revolution was just around the corner. Communist leaders and others were jailed, publications were banned, and street demonstrations were met with harsh measures carried out by federal, provincial, and local law enforcement.
In the Second World War, the long-established pattern continued, this time added to by the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese Canadians from the west coast to the B.C. interior, and in some cases as far east as Ontario. Their property was seized and deportations to Japan were liberally carried out after the war ended.
During the Cold War, intense internal security continued, focused once again on communist and other radicals, particularly after the Gouzenko spy revelations with a special royal commission and the jailing of a number of Canadians with charges of espionage. One of these was a member of Parliament.
During the 1970 October crisis, the federal government once again invoked the War Measures Act to enhance its power to surveil, arrest, and detain suspected supporters of the FLQ. The vast majority of Canadians supported these measures.
Indeed until the passage of the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1960 and the adoption of the Charter of Rights in 1982, few Canadians seemed concerned about placing limits on government powers to surveil, arrest, and so on individuals whose activities were deemed to pose a threat to Canadian security. There were some civil liberties groups, church groups, and others who protested such actions as unduly repressive, but most Canadians still trusted government to do the right thing and related to government as patrons of a paternalistic and trusted institution.
For reasons too complex to enter here—of course I'll be glad to answer questions you may have—Canadians' views of government have evolved rapidly since the adoption of the Charter of Rights. Canadian society has evolved into a charter-based society. Most Canadians are now acutely conscious that they have rights and that efforts to abridge those rights had better be based on solid evidence of malfeasance by real enemies of our society.
The problem is that defining who those real enemies are has become much more difficult in the age of the Internet, because Canadians still believe an important distinction exists and must be protected between those who speak or write of ideas that many Canadians find intolerable and those who actively engage in espionage or violent means of undermining the foundations of our society.
After the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, this problem became even more acute. After terrorist attacks across Europe and even in Canada over the past decade and a half, efforts to maintain our traditional approach of innocence until proven guilty have been sorely strained.
We are now living in an age that presents us with a very difficult choice, privacy or security—not privacy “and” security, because we are way past that. How do we protect our traditional rights and freedoms in an age when some disaffected person needs only access to the Internet to become a perpetrator of mass destruction?
Our governments of both political stripes have been grappling with this very difficult issue since at least the passage of the Anti-terrorism Act of 2001. Having spent three years on the advisory council on national security, I was exposed to many of the issues discussed in the national security green paper.
The discussions of the advisory council were classified, and are probably still classified now, so I am constrained about what I can discuss. The one issue I can raise, because it has been widely discussed here and in other democracies, is the constant failure of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information so that someone, at least, can piece together the big picture before it is too late. At the same time, this need to share information can cut right across Canadians' privacy rights. Government must decide which is the greater evil: to share, with the possible violation of privacy rights, or to refrain, with the possible danger of attack.
From what I know of the world of technology and security, the problems we face today will only get worse with the advance of new technologies and the increased ability of bad actors to use cyberspace as a means of manipulating our political systems, gathering our private and secret information, crippling our infrastructure, stealing our intellectual property, and damaging our economies.
Yes, so-called lone wolf attacks must be guarded against to the best of our abilities, which will of necessity violate privacy rights, but the danger from cyberspace is far greater to all of us. We must not lose sight of that growing threat.
Thank you.