I, too, apologize. Thank you, first of all, for putting this on. You're outnumbering us [Inaudible—Editor].
Thank you for coming. I only heard about this yesterday, although I decided to meet the Prime Minister on this when he was coming to Calgary. I met him with the banner and asked him not to side with Harper on this one. We had a three-minute conversation, which is lovely. It felt like democracy for the first time.
I come to this as an activist in human rights. I'm an environmental activist. I've done work with Green Peace. I've gotten myself arrested up in the tar sands. I come at this as someone who follows human rights and upholds them, and advocates for them wherever possible.
My arguments are usually emotional arguments, and I can't debate the pieces of the legislation because I have not seen all the legislation, which itself is interesting. If a citizen who is as engaged as I am in this has not seen the pieces of legislation, and yet I am subject to it, that is a curious thing indeed.
What kind of democracy are we in when this legislation which was passed by a government, the Harper government—which is not the Canadian government, apparently—which is known for its authoritarian manner in passing legislation, whether it was through omnibus bills or hurried debate.... This legislation was one of those things that was not widely debated by the public, and it should have been.
Even in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the idea is that if there's going to be an infringement of our charter rights, it will be the least possible infringement.
Here in Calgary I took part in Occupy.... Hello, I'm an activist. One of the things that shortened our free speech, our act of civil disobedience, as it were, was the idea that we should keep off the grass. We had a talk about this in Calgary. Some people from the law society and so on had a talk about what it is to keep off the grass while maintaining your free speech. The city used this smallest law to infringe on our charter rights. Perhaps we need to leave our encampments for various reasons. I don't want to get into that. But here they infringe on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for the slightest misdemeanour.
There are people all over the world fighting for their rights, fighting for the basic rights that we now take for granted. We certainly do, and the parliamentarians who passed this bill take them for granted, or perhaps they don't. Perhaps they understood full well what this bill meant.
We use ISIS and ISIL right now. We talk about them. They are the bogeyman. By the way, look up what bogeymen are. They're actually indigenous Indonesians who were opposing English rule, which is curious.
What happens when we have a government in power that isn't so benevolent, that doesn't have a prime minister with fantastic hair and a good rapport with everybody? What happens when terrorism becomes stopping a pipeline because you have a moral imperative to act for the future, to preserve an environment for future generations?
Let's say that we're polluting a source of water here with sewage, and somebody decides that it's more important now to break the minor law in order to uphold the greater law. That, under this legislation, can be considered an act of terrorism, and the RCMP and CSIS can investigate us. They can monitor us. They can tap us, and they can arrest us pre-emptively, without a warrant for an act of civil disobedience.
This applies to indigenous rights, the indigenous people of this country upholding their rights. This applies there. I would say that this legislation was in fact implemented in a finicky manner to pre-empt and co-opt, subvert, that kind of activity. It's to prevent civil disobedience and disagreement with the state.
Chris Hedges said.... Now I've lost it. Oh, here it is.
