Thank you very much.
I had prepared more than three minutes' worth, but I'll have to meet the criteria. Thank you for the opportunity.
I'm glad that this standing committee exists. The one time in my life that I was before a standing committee of the House of Commons, we were gloriously successful, but I don't necessarily expect that to happen today.
I would like to begin with a short quotation from the British historian and peace activist, E. P. Thompson, who said, “The deformed human mind is the ultimate doomsday weapon.”
If ever two dots needed connecting, they are the current developments around Bill C-51 and Bill C-22 on the one hand, and, on the other, the historic ruling by a B.C. Supreme Court judge in the case of the 2013 so-called Canada Day terror plot in Victoria. That ruling, called a “stunner” by Faisal Kutty in a recent issue of the Toronto Star, should be an international landmark.
Yet in all the reportage—my background is in journalism and communications—and almost all the commentary I've seen to date, including that by commentators wary or critical of spy agencies, the B.C. Supreme Court ruling has become more or less an elephant in the room. Its heart is “police-manufactured” terrorism. Those words are from Madam Justice Bruce of the B.C. Supreme Court. The words that are not sufficiently used but should be for an operation like this are “false flag operation”. A deep and wide and adult conversation about false flag operations in general is long overdue and could well be—and should be, in my opinion—one of the contexts for this committee's hearings.
The “police-manufactured crime” quote is from a 344-page ruling by Madam Justice Bruce on July 29, striking down the terrorism convictions of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody. As Thomas Walkom observed in the August 3 Toronto Star, “the entire bomb plot couldn't have happened if the RCMP hadn't organized it”. The Mounties cruelly exploited two impoverished recovering heroin addicts with clearly obvious mental health challenges.
I couldn't help but think about this, which I was planning to discuss anyway, in listening two hours earlier to the experts before this committee. It almost seemed to be very airy-fairy to me, very legislatively complex and so forth, without a reference to this larger context of what happens in the real world and what generates headlines and causes anxiety throughout society.
Academic studies, official reports, and even newspaper editorials show that the theat of terrorism has for years been blown far out of proportion, much as has been discussed here and is a matter of legitimate scrutiny for this committee.