Utopia, spy drones and security cameras

Councillors Merulla and Green lay out their expected hyperbole

You can always count on councillors Sam Merulla and Matthew Green to ratchet up the lingo when they have a cause to promote.

The expanding debate over changing the city’s rules on home security cameras is a case in point. At Wednesday’s council meeting, neither Merulla nor Green could resist the allure of overstatement.

According to Merulla, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, who has waded into the issue, might be better employed shepherding privacy concerns in the State of Utopia.

Green, on the other hand, is once again channeling Chicken Little by warning us the dystopian day of spyin-the-sky drones is just a bylaw change away.

Both pieces of trowel work stem from Merulla’s proposal to let people aim their security cameras at the sidewalk and street in front of their homes to boost public safety and potentially assist police investigations.

To that end, council has directed staff to report on the feasibility of changing an existing bylaw that prevents home security cameras from pointing anywhere other than a person’s home turf.

The report will also study the potential impact on people’s privacy, including concerns by Ontario privacy commissioner Brian Beamish that changing the bylaw to aid police in collecting personal information would undermine legislated privacy rights.

Merulla, never averse to tweaking the nose of a sacred cow, argued that Beamish’s premise that people have the right to privacy on public lands is an “oxymoron.”

“In many ways I think he should be the privacy commissioner of Utopia,” Merulla said in response to the concerns the commissioner emailed to council.

Though acknowledging the watchdog’s fears should be weighed, Merulla bitingly noted that social justice advocates never seem to worry about privacy issues when it comes to getting police to wear lapel cameras and yet the same people don’t want private cameras aimed at public land.

“You can’t suck and blow at the same time,” Merulla said.

Merulla’s message, one supported by Hamilton police, is that a home security camera that narrowly takes in the street outside a person’s house is a personal security and crime fighting and deterrence tool that doesn’t trespass on the privacy of law-abiding passersby.

“At the end of the day this helps policing, it helps community, it helps me as a resident protect my front sidewalk. I’m not pointing at my neighbours’ front yards or their door. I’m pointing at the sidewalk and the road and any activity in front of my house can be captured.”

Not surprisingly, Green, council’s most highfalutin’ social justice warrior, takes a polar opposite view.

Claiming that he didn’t want to sound “alarmist,” Green nonetheless quickly flipped an air raid siren switch.

“We’re not far off from a place, if we go down this path, where we will have drone surveillance everywhere,” he warned.

Maybe Green is right. Maybe that dreaded day will come, particularly in a world where mobile phone, dash cam, red light, store, office, bank machine, school, apartment, condo, bus and parking lot video surveillance is already a fact of everyday life.

But it’s doubtful the tipping point will be whether Hamilton changes a 2010 bylaw that hardly any other municipality in Ontario enforces for the excellent reason it’s unenforceable.

Green is on far more solid ground arguing that when the staff report lands council needs to consider the guidelines and best practises for lawful and justifiable video surveillance spelled out by the office of the Ontario privacy commissioner.

He’s also right to suggest that before council makes a decision on changing the bylaw, public delegations should be allowed to speak to the appropriate balance between safety and security and privacy and civil rights.

Good one-liners and warnings of spy drones sweeping the skies will always grab attention, of course. But it’s also true that reasonable calls to action will advance the discussion better than hyperbole ever does.

Andrew Dreschel’s commentary appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. adreschel@thespec.com @AndrewDreschel 905-526-3495