Mr. Speaker, I have heard the government defend that somehow, the magic incantation of lawful advocacy, protests and dissent is the Holy Grail, and that we need not worry about it. However, as the member properly points out, the word “lawful”, as with so many of the key terms in the bill, is completely undefined. The member is right that it is not authorized by law.
What I have tried to say in my remarks is that sometimes civil and or criminal injunctions are transgressed by people. That, by definition, is unlawful, I presume. They are engaged in civil disobedience because they understand that there is a consequence of civil disobedience. That is what the sense often involves in the labour context and in the environmental context.
I have had indigenous leaders come to me, frightened by what this might mean as they engage in the kind of dissent that is obviously taking place up and down our coast against the Enbridge northern gateway pipeline. They have asked for legal advice and what this would mean. Would CSIS be going after them, disrupting their activities, infiltrating them?
Do we need our intelligence gathering agency to do that? We have a perfectly competent RCMP that does that, and has done it well, and that understands the need to gather evidence carefully, and so forth. To turn an intelligence agency into some kind of law enforcement agency like this is really reprehensible.