Thank you and good evening.
My name is Johan Boyden, and I am speaking on behalf of the Communist Party of Canada. Our party will be submitting a brief on this review, and I would like to offer you the highlights, in particular, our view that Bill C-51 is unamendable and must be repealed in full, and the building case for dismantling CSIS altogether.
In our view, this bill is perhaps the most serious assault on democratic rights, labour rights, and civil liberties in recent times, and we are not alone in making this case. Mr. Oliphant, many of the people who voted for you in Thorncliffe Park, members of the Muslim community, share this view, as do experts, intellectuals, and people from labour. I could spend my entire three minutes going through the hundreds of organizations just from Quebec that signed a declaration against this legislation and its composite effects.
Why? Because it mandates more clearly a secret police force, with black operations, disruption, or dirty tricks that would shred the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allowing it basically to scoop up people from the streets. This broad definition—economic and fiscal stability—could directly infringe labour's right to strike or, more broadly, any movement, indigenous, environmental, and so forth, that is resisting the agenda of the big corporations. It's a piece of legislation that would have made solidarity with Nelson Mandela illegal and also today's solidarity with Palestine or with Colombia, which is working its way through peace talks.
If you look at the question of government oversight that your discussion paper and green paper have suggested, I think it is either naive or deliberately deceptive. The presentation that SIRC could effectively regulate CSIS is in reality not true; it is a powerless body. Consider the scandals involving Chuck Strahl and other past chairs of this committee. It is totally complicit.
I would like to note that this legislation came forward in the context of an increasingly reckless aggressive foreign policy, wars and occupations, and destabilizing global impacts, and it is the call for peace and the foreign policy of disarmament that is the strongest case against the so-called radicalization that your background paper speaks of with great alarm.
I'd also draw your attention to the fact that the CIA is probably the most overseen by the Senate and Congress of any of the intelligence agencies in the world and, in fact, the CIA operates to extend U.S. foreign policy into the sphere of dirty operations. This claim that oversight and empowering SIRC will do the job is just not held up by the facts around the world. It's time to get rid of CSIS.
If I may, I'll conclude with a few points.