Principled conservatives should work to repeal Bill C-51

Bill C-51, the government’s “antiterrorist” legislation, has now passed through Parliament, received royal assent and become law. This has done nothing to dampen the controversy surrounding the bill and there is now a growing campaign calling for it to be repealed. Recent polls suggest that Bill C-51 is already shaping up to be a significant issue in October’s election.

As a lifelong conservative, it hasn’t escaped my notice that, with the exception of organizations like the National Firearms Association and the Libertarian party, there has been a good degree of silence about this issue from Canadians on the right.

This is, perhaps, somewhat expected because it was a Conservative government that drafted the legislation and that ultimately used its majority to push the bill into law with severely limited debate and no meaningful amendments. But, just because a piece of legislation is created by a Conservative government, does that automatically make it worthy of the backing of the party’s grassroots supporters?

I submit that the principled answer to that question is “No.”

For many years, as we worked to help develop the conservative movement into something that was strong and capable enough to gain the confidence of Canadians and ultimately form government, we were also working on important issues as an effective opposition.

Abolishing the gun registry was very important to many of us because we felt it was grossly unfair for long gun owners to be forced to submit their personal information to a government database. The privacy implications, the potential for abuse of the information and the enormous cost of building and maintaining the database were all reasons that we insisted the long gun registry had to go.

We said that Canadians should not have to worry about their personal information being shared without their permission or knowledge, or about it being stored insecurely.

Similarly, we fought against Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which dealt with “hate propaganda,” because of its harmful effect on freedom of speech and because of its potential for abuse by unaccountable government bureaucrats.

We said that websites should not be shut down over non-violent speech and that unaccountable bureaucrats should not be allowed to disrupt the lives of innocent Canadians.

Ultimately, both the long gun registry and Section 13 were repealed due to the efforts of grassroots conservatives who were fighting for important principles of freedom and democracy.

Those principles are every bit as im- portant today as they were when we were fighting against laws that were enacted by Liberal governments.

Canadians deserve to have their private information kept private … not for it to be stored in multiple databases and shared freely between multiple government departments, and even with private individuals without regulation or oversight. And this is even more the case today as database breaches are becoming more and more common.

We deserve to exercise our freedom of speech without fear of being “disrupted” by government agents, having our websites shut down or being unjustly branded as “terrorists.”

We fought against the gun registry and Section 13, not simply because they were laws that were enacted by a Liberal government. We fought against them because they violated our core values.

We must not ignore those important principles just because they are being violated this time by a Conservative government. Bill C-51 would never have passed our collective “smell test” if it had been proposed by the Liberals or the NDP. We owe it to conservatism and to our country to uphold freedom and democracy no matter whose laws we have to challenge.

As conservatives, I would say we have a particular duty to hold our own leadership accountable when they make bad laws. In this case, they made a bad law, and they used their majority to push it though, completely ignoring all of the expert advice on how they could amend it to make it more effective and less oppressive to innocent Canadians. This was a power grab. Pure and simple.

As we head to the polls in October, we need to vote for principles, not for parties and not for personalities.

I know that when I mark my X, I will be thinking about Bill C-51, and I will be asking myself who I can trust to uphold my values instead of betraying them. I guarantee that that candidate will not be a Conservative or a Liberal. You can learn more about the growing non-partisan campaign to repeal Bill C-51 at KillC51.ca

We must not ignore our important principles just because they are being violated by a Conservative government