Spies’ powers enhanced

New bill targets ‘violent jihadism,’ but Canadians may have to take it on faith new rules aren’t abused.

As the government tabled a sweeping new anti-terrorism bill in Parliament on Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a strong speech in suburban Toronto, looking profoundly self-assured as he laid out the political case for the enormous change his government is making.

We live in a dangerous new world and must deal with the urgent threat posed by “violent jihadism,” Harper said, pointing to the two attacks of October as justification for these new powers.

It seems wise to recall that we must take it on his word that they were, as they appear, planned terrorist attacks, since security officials have not reported on connections between the attackers and terror groups. Without access to the secret information that Harper and his officials have, it is difficult to assess the arguments for the necessity of these changes and impossible to counter them.

The public is alarmed by recent events in Canada and abroad. The prime minister has been nurturing our fear and is now using it as a mandate to greatly expand the secret national-security apparatus that protects us.

It is wise to keep in mind that he has powerful political reasons to do this. He is strong on these issues where the other leaders are weak, and anything that allows him to cast himself as the fatherly protector sets up a good contrast for him as we head toward an election this fall.

So we will now move into a new era of greatly empowered spies. There is reason to hope that will make us safer. It also threatens our freedoms, a concern that the prime minister breezily dismissed after his speech.

“We do not buy the argument that every time you protect Canadians you take away civil liberties,” he said.

His certainty that these new laws don’t pose a threat gives us reason to be grateful that the courts will eventually rule on the constitutionality of these laws — a process that will take years — and reason to hope that we will eventually get proper parliamentary oversight of our intelligence agencies.

In comparison with our allies, Canada has long taken a more passive approach to intelligence. We have not always faced the same kinds of threats that Britain, the United States or France face, and have not had the same kind of security structures in place.

That has been changing since Sept. 11. This legislation will accelerate those changes. We now need the same kind of oversight that our allies have long had — an all-party parliamentary committee made up of MPs empowered to watch our spies.

All of our allies in the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership — Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States — have such committees now.

On Friday, the prime minister rejected the idea, as his government has repeatedly rejected it in the past. It will now be up to the opposition parties to convince Canadians that we need it.

It should not be that difficult to make the case.

Under the laws tabled on Friday, CSIS gets huge new powers. Although the courts will review their application on a case-by-case basis, it will also be necessary for them to be reviewed on a systematic level by our representatives, not just timorous civil servants and vote-seeking political staffers.

The laws give sweeping new powers to engage in “threat-disruption activity” within Canada and overseas, and to imprison people who express support for terrorism.

Judges will have to authorize “disruption activity” that violates the individual rights of terrorism suspects, which is good, but this will create a whole set of behaviours for CSIS that need to be carefully supervised.

RCMP officers will continue to be responsible for enforcing the law, but CSIS agents will be able to disrupt terrorist schemes. How will the two agencies decide who should have the lead? Who will manage conflicts?

There’s a new law against promoting terrorism that raises worrying questions about freedom of expression. Judges will ultimately decide what constitutes expressing support for terrorism, but government officials — who are subject to political considerations — will play a key role in deciding who gets investigated. An investigation itself could be catastrophic to an innocent person.

There is a long tradition in Canadian law enforcement of treating critics of the government as radicals to be spied upon. This law gives the spies a hugely powerful new tool to target those with unpopular or minority views. It will be abused.

The government will also have the power to detain terrorism suspects for crimes that “may be carried out,” lowering the onus from “will be carried out.” It may be wise for the government to make it easier to impose preventive detention on would-be jihadis, but this too could be abused.

All of this new spying is to be supervised only by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, since in 2012 the government got rid of the CSIS inspector general’s office. It is hard to have much faith in SIRC, given that the government has not bothered to keep it fully staffed, and previously had an accused fraudster running it.

The expansion of the Canadian secret national- security apparatus is inevitable. If Canadians are to have faith that these vast new powers are not abused by power-mad or incompetent spies, we must keep an eye on them.

There is no good reason not to do so and it’s worrying that this government doesn’t see that.