Mr. Speaker, this speaking time I have been given allows me the opportunity to share my initial thoughts on the routine nature of the government's surveillance activities. Why routine? It is simple. In the past few years, we have been introduced to a number of government initiatives that would allow the government to intrude into Canadians' private lives. It has become recurrent, hence the routine nature. It has become so routine that even in the north, environmental activists came to see me recently for some legal and political advice on the chances of their being investigated and followed simply because of their actions during demonstrations and their environmental activism. Slowly but surely, Canadians have become paranoid. In a way, that paranoia is justified and has been fuelled by these initiatives that have been gradually introduced over the past few years. I have seen a number of them, and this bill, this initiative before us today, is no exception.
Bill C-44, An Act to amend the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and other Acts, contains amendments that will considerably enhance the power of our intelligence agencies to act abroad in the context of investigations related to threats to Canada's security.
I will now stress that certain isolated incidents are hastily labelled as terrorist acts so that they can be fitted into a narrative to instill fear in the population for electoral purposes.
I will provide a very simple example of an event that was hastily labelled an act of terrorism. The day after the October incident in the House of Commons, I was invited to a televised debate at a television station. I was accompanied by a Liberal colleague and a Conservative colleague. The Conservative colleague did not hesitate, at every turn, barely 24 hours after the incident, to label it terrorism. He already had speaking points, a prepared and spoon-fed message. It was already deemed an act of terrorism.
We should also realize that although there was media hype and biased reporting by some media, one English newspaper reported the information a few days later and mentioned that the person who had gone to Parliament Hill with a hunting rifle was first and foremost a drug addict. I think that should be mentioned. In fact, he was a crack user. Crack is a crystallized form of cocaine that is made using ammonia.
This is my bailiwick. At the risk of repeating myself, as hon. members know, I am a criminal lawyer and I worked mainly with mental health-related cases. The vast majority of my clientele was made up of hard drug users. They can be unpredictable at times. During a court appearance, a client might decide to sing, cry, shout or utter threats. Even judges in our legal system are used to seeing that. When you see thousands of people like that in a single year, you start to get used to it. When a client like that is put on trial, the defence lawyer will often tell the judge that he thinks that his client is currently in a fragile state of mind and that he is not necessarily in full possession of his faculties. The lawyer then suggests that the hearing or trial be postponed for a few days to give his client enough time to come back down to earth, because he will utter threats to everyone and he is currently aggressive. It often takes a number of police officers to control these people. Clients on freebase, or crack, are hard to control.
Accordingly, regardless the individual's allegiance, origin, or even religion, he was above all a hard drug user who had mental health problems. I think we also have a societal duty, because the individual is in very good company. I have been in Ottawa for four years, and I have seen that there are countless hard drug addicts. A few minutes' walk from Parliament Hill, in front of the shopping centre, you will see people selling crack in front of McDonald's in broad daylight. Young people can see this go on all day long. Hard drugs are being sold near Canada's Parliament. We have seen situations like what happened here, where an individual blows a fuse—if I can put it that way—and decides to wave a shotgun around in public.
We have seen others in Ottawa. It is not limited to this city. You can see this kind of thing everywhere. However, a distinction needs to be made here.
Rather than talking about terrorism, we should be talking about addiction to hard drugs and mental health. That is a lot more relevant. People living in Ottawa who see that on a regular basis will probably agree. This is a social problem.
What measures and resources would help drug addicts? The media reported that the individual in question used a shelter not far from here and that he was in contact with other drug addicts. This is a societal issue that deserves a little more thought than labelling something terrorism 24 hours later.
The Conservatives have used recent events to justify giving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service more powers. They claim that this bill is necessary to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from carrying out attacks in Canada.
Still, we should consider the warning that Justice Iacobucci issued about the spillover effects that rushing to expand police powers can have on freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom of expression; the possible tainting of Canada's Muslim community; and the risk of overreaching by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service when sharing information in a global fight against terrorism.
I just want to point out that Justice Iacobucci, a former Supreme Court judge, is studied in law faculties across the country. I studied him for six years, and he is highly respected. He says that there is a risk of tainting Canada's Muslim community because that information is sensationalized by media outlets of dubious repute just to sell copies. Some people try to blame everything bad in the world on the Muslim community, and because of Islamophobia, we end up with situations like the one going on in Sept-Îles right now.
There are not many Arabs or Muslims in my home town. There is one who is tyring to build a mosque, and a few times now, some misguided individuals have smashed the walls of his building. He was forced to put up a barbed wire fence. We are talking about the 51st parallel. It is -25 degrees Celsius there today. While conditions are already difficult for someone from the Middle East or the Arab world, he also has to put up with the fact that the local media and our own government are misinforming the population and trying to demonize that community. This is not good for Canadian unity or for the intellectual evolution of our country and our youth. We need to put an end to this kind of discourse.