Transport committee  I would like to thank you for having invited me. My name is Nathalie Des Rosiers, and I am here on behalf of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The first part of my presentation will be in French, and the second in English. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is a no

Transport committee  Well, simply, it's not the right calculation to think that it's a zero-sum game, that if you increase security you decrease human rights, and that's okay. I think you need the enhancement. That's how I was going to finish. And I'll just read my last sentence for you, which is tha

Transport committee  No system is perfect. In our view, the intelligence continues to be...if it's evidence-based and if it's well done, I think should be and will continue to be part of the system. Because airport security is not the only security issue in the country. I mean, the bombing in Times S

Transport committee  That's right.

Transport committee  Yes. Certainly I think proportionality is the essence of our civil liberties and democratic regime. It requires an assessment what the costs will be to the civil liberties of the individual. My point today is simply to say that if you're going to do a cost assessment of all thes

Transport committee  I think racial profiling has several drawbacks. The first one is that it has a lot of false negatives. It's not appropriate because it is indeed targeting many people who are not likely to be terrorists at all. So to start with, it's not efficient. It also has the drawback of b

Public Safety committee  Thank you for your invitation. I am here on behalf of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. I am accompanied by Graeme Norton. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been in existence since 1964 and is a rights and liberties advocacy agency in Canada. My predecessor is

Public Safety committee  Okay. I'll just conclude briefly on this. Basically, on the fence, we are inviting a prioritization. The weaponry is the same, and I think for the entire legal structure.... I want to conclude with two things. You have now the terms of reference that we're suggesting, which we

Public Safety committee  That's correct.

Public Safety committee  Yes, certainly. I think several of our own monitors were searched. The searches were done during the week, throughout the week, I think, and were far removed from around the fence. There were people being detained, people being searched. I did my own tour as part of the monitorin

Public Safety committee  I think we saw some property being removed from bags. Police officers seemed to believe that they were obeying orders or that they had the right to do it. We've documented not only what was happening but what was said, because it seemed to us that there was a fundamental problem

Public Safety committee  Our own monitors were denied the right to counsel when they went to the detention centre. We had someone trying to reach them, a lawyer, and I was trying to reach them through the night, and it was not to be so.

Public Safety committee  Certainly we recognize that it was a difficult job, but in our view, the incidents we saw reached a threshold that was higher than what we should expect. They were certainly not in compliance with the Canadian Constitution.

Public Safety committee  No, we have not.

Public Safety committee  Yes. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson wrote back to us to acknowledge receipt of our report and indicated that the matter had been referred to Minister Toews. We have received some indications from the Auditor General, to whom we provided our report as well, that acknowledged our r