Mr. Speaker, I will say the Green Party completely agrees with the NDP and is actually committed to ensuring this bill is repealed after an election, not just amended or fixed. It cannot be fixed.
I am not surprised to hear the parliamentary secretary repeat that somehow those of us in opposition who oppose this bill do not understand it. I can assure everyone that I understand it fully. This bill is dangerous, and it is dangerous precisely because it would not make us safer from terrorists, as we have heard from many security witnesses, both in the House committee and now before the Senate committee.
The bill would create silos. RCMP operatives and CSIS operatives would be given powers to disrupt, with no pinnacle control or command, no one to know whether the CSIS operatives were giving permission or commitments to witnesses that they would never be called, who may be part of an RCMP investigation that needs that witness' testimony. The way in which this is being set up, in the words of security experts, particularly Joe Fogarty, who is a British security expert, is that we are “sitting on a tragedy waiting to happen”. This is not good legislation to protect us from terrorists, and it would certainly be unacceptably intrusive and destroy charter rights and freedoms through secret trials.