Mr. Speaker, I come from the home of the BlackBerry. If you think of the BlackBerry, it will remind you of my riding of Kitchener—Waterloo.
Let me thank the hon. member for his input and read for him a quote by the deputy leader of the Liberal Party. In The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, he states:
Openness in any process where human liberty is at stake is simply definitional of what a democracy is. The problem is not defining where the redline lies, but enforcing it. A democracy in which most people don't vote, in which many judges accord undue deference to executive decisions, and in which government refuses open adversarial review of its measures is not likely to keep the right balance between security and liberty. A war on terror is not just a challenge to democracy; it is an interrogation of the vitality of its capacity for adversarial review.
I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this issue. There is something fundamentally flawed in the approach we have undertaken. The security certificate, as we know, predates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It predates the Anti-terrorism Act. Actually, it has been in place in this form for 30 years under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
Of course, we are debating changes to this process in this chamber, yet the Anti-terrorism Act is now being debated in the Senate, which is dealing with parts of the act. It seems to me that when we talk about these two pieces of legislation they are not divorced from each other. We really have to consider the implications of both.
There is a question that I think we as parliamentarians should answer. Let us look at the empirical evidence of what has happened in terms of actions that have been taken since 9/11, the fateful day that caused us to rush into anti-terrorism legislation. Of course, this is part and companion of that, of what already existed. We really have to look at whether we have enhanced the security of Canadians. And have we enhanced the security of the rest of the people on this planet or have we made it worse?
I put that to members because we have a long history of, in times of crisis when we need the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, taking away these rights. My question--