A bad precedent
“Are you a journalist?” tweeted American whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday. “The police spying on you specifically to ID your sources isn’t a hypothetical,” he warned. “This is today.”
Snowden was referring to the case of Patrick Lagacé, a columnist at Montreal’s La Presse newspaper, who revealed that police have been spying on him for months, tracking his whereabouts using his cellphone and monitoring his calls and texts. Montreal police suspected that a target of one of their internal investigations was leaking information to Lagacé and so applied for — and, bizarrely, received — a series of warrants to monitor the columnist.
The state spying on a journalist suspected of no wrongdoing, in an apparent attempt to identify his sources, is unprecedented in Canadian history and poses a troubling threat to freedom of the press. The Supreme Court of Canada has warned against exactly this practice. “The press should not be turned into an investigative arm of the police,” the majority wrote in a 1991 ruling, which laid out the narrow grounds on which the state can legitimately seize journalistic materials. Given that such seizures “could well hamper the ability of the press to gather information,” and thus undermine the media’s essential democratic function, warrants should be issued only as a last resort, the court decided. Yet there is no indication that any other investigative avenues were explored in this case.
More troubling still, the surveillance of Lagacé is not the only recent incident in Quebec where freedom of the press was put at risk. In September, Quebec police seized the computer of Journal de Montreal reporter Michael Nguyen after he wrote a story on allegations of abusive behaviour against a Quebec Court judge. The warrant suggested Nguyen illegally hacked a private website to obtain his information. In fact, the details were available to anyone with a cursory knowledge of Google.
Twice in recent months Quebec police have targeted journalists as they attempted to hold the state to account. In both cases, judges have approved warrants that, as the Supreme Court has said, are bound to have a chilling effect on sources. Indeed, that may have been the point. “I’m convinced this is an attempt to intimidate everyone inside the police force who may want to talk to a journalist,” Lagacé told CBC news.
Whatever the rationale, the precedent could hardly be more troubling. As La Presse editor in chief Éric Trottier wrote in Monday’s edition of the paper, such surveillance “irredeemably compromises the confidence that must exist between a journalist and his or her source so that citizens can be informed of subjects that are in the public interest and can participate in an enlightened manner in the democratic life of the country.”
The province’s politicians have joined together to denounce these practices, but idle reprimands are not enough. Quebec’s public security minister says he will look into the matter. He must. The province should conduct a comprehensive review and explain to the public how we got to this worrying place and who exactly is responsible. Either policies and procedures are broken, or they have been violated and heads should roll. This anti-democratic spark must be snuffed out before it is allowed to catch.
Quebec newspaper columnist has revealed that police have been tracking him for months