Thank you. I speak as an individual.
In the 1960s, the RCMP burned down a barn to prevent a political meeting. They broke into an office to steal the membership list of an electoral political party. They spread false rumours of an individual's psychiatric history in a political group, and they did other things. These and other revelations created a scandal that led, of course, to the McDonald commission, which we know well, and to I think the Keable commission in Quebec.
That led to the creation of CSIS, in order to remove political analysis from the RCMP and turn them into just a police force, but that didn't stop the RCMP from, as we have heard, bombing an oil well in Alberta and from entrapping two rather confused individuals in B.C., as we saw in the court case that came down recently. Bill C-51, rather than reining in the security forces from these behaviours, seems to encourage more of it by CSIS, and probably by other security forces as well as by the RCMP.
The Harper government used rhetoric linking environmentalists to terrorism. Under Bill C-51, would the committee think that a community organizing to protect clean drinking water could be surveilled and disrupted?
Bill C-51, as I understand it, even authorizes security forces to request a warrant to explicitly violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to disrupt a political movement. I presume that asking a judge to override the charter would be found unconstitutional eventually. If it isn't, we might as well go to Texas. How likely is it that a case could even get to court, how long would it take to get a judgment, and even if the judgment found the warrant unconstitutional, how long would the law remain on the books for security agencies to cite?
This is just one example of Bill C-51's outrageous and flagrant abuses. It's shameful that the party that became the government voted for this bill, and it would be just as shameful if this committee didn't recommend the outright repeal of Bill C-51 or a complete overhaul that amounts to repeal. I think you should go on to redress the abuses by the security agencies that went on before Bill C-51 and that undoubtedly are continuing to go on.
Thank you.