More than ‘cyberbullying’

One of the Conservative government’s most embarrassing missteps was in February 2012, when Vic Toews, then public safety minister, defended an over-reaching online surveillance bill by saying its critics could “stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

A year later, the government dropped the so-called Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. “We’ve listened to the concerns of Canadians,” said justice minister Rob Nicholson.

On Wednesday, his successor, Peter MacKay, stood behind a podium labelled Protecting Our Children to announce new legislation, branded as an attempt to prosecute cyberbullying — such as the posting of images deemed sexually explicit online without consent.

It also includes a new law making it a criminal offence to steal cable television — punishable by up to two years in jail. That has precisely nothing to do with the protection of children, but by bundling it in with this legislation, the Conservatives can once again portray the opposition or any critics in civil society as people who just don’t care about children, or who even side with society’s most reviled predators.

The new bill also resurrects some of the surveillance tools that were in the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.

If the government wants to make cable theft a criminal offence, or increase police powers to track online communication, it is perfectly within its rights to propose those things. There is no reason to bundle it in with a bill that has an entirely different purpose. The announcement about the bill calls it “legislation to crack down on cyberbullying.” This suggests the Conservatives never learned the main lesson from Toews’ debacle, and are still trying to bundle and brand their legislation instead of simply defending it on its merits.

The core of the bill is the idea that people who share “intimate” images could go to prison for up to five years. It’s a wellintentioned proposal that could stop some harassment. But it is also a sweeping limit on expression that merits a robust discussion, to ensure it won’t have unintended or disproportionate consequences. The Conservatives, as self-described champions of small government, should welcome such a discussion whenever there’s a proposal on the table to criminalize behaviour. Packaging unrelated things into the bill simply because they have some connection to telecommunications can only distract from that important discussion.