I'm Holly Dressel.
I've taught at McGill in environmental studies, and I've worked a great deal.... For instance, Suzuki is a perfect example. He talked about the concentration camps and how we used laws like this to put people away. That is exactly what happened to the man I worked with for 25 years.
I work a great deal with native groups. I can tell you that I was shocked to find out, when I started working in Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne, that nearly all the environmental activists that I dealt with who were native had had dealings with CSIS. CSIS had come. These were just regular little people living in little houses on the reserve. CSIS had come around in their lives in almost every case. They would make jokes about it. They would exchange CSIS stories.
How would you like to be in that position where CSIS is regularly checking on you and trying to get your friends to talk about you? This is one of the things that already happens to native activists and environmental activists.
One of the things that many of us thought—many thousands of people—when Stephen Harper pushed this bill through in the first place was that one of its major reasons would be to discourage native land claims and native activism to stop oil pipelines and fracking. We know that this is a constant preoccupation of federal governments. Now it is the preoccupation of the Liberal federal government, but this is a Stephen Harper creature, and frankly, if you, the Liberals, stick with this, if the current federal government sticks with this act, it will go down in history as your act, not Stephen Harper's, I assure you.
The big problem with it is exactly that: the way it criminalizes freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and everything that identifies a democracy.
The final thing I would say is that it's supposed to be against terrorism, but the idea of terrorism is to prevent people who will not allow you to have freedom from taking over your life, right? A terrorist is someone who makes you afraid to do what you want to do.
How many rural people do you think can go out there...? Once again, I've worked a great deal with farmers and rural people attempting to protect their watershed, their forest areas, or something from industrialization. How many of those people do you think will have the courage to go out and risk seven days of being held incommunicado and being called a terrorist? As this bill stands, it is too vague to protect that kind of action.
The questioner here, who I think was Mr. Mendicino, was talking about situations where this kind of citizen dissent gets out of hand. This hardly ever happens. When it does, it tends to be because of agents provocateurs. I was present at one such thing in Seattle in the year 2000. I watched and we watched the agents provocateurs come into downtown Seattle. They were great big gigantic guys who nobody had seen, in masks, and they had big lead pipes and went through and broke a bunch of windows at Starbucks and stuff, and then they vanished. Then the helicopters came in.
There have been cases of this—I don't have to tell you—in Montebello and so forth, so this is not any kind—
I notice that he's not paying any attention to me. However, I would say that—