As soon as Harpo's Bill C-51
House Government Bill - Bill C-51 - First Reading (41-2) passes opinions will be considered a terrorist act.
Justin seems to be going along with the Cons on this one.........
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had hoped to stickhandle their way past Stephen Harper’s sweeping new anti-terror bill. The strategy could backfire.
It could backfire because it contradicts everything Trudeau claims to stand for.
The Liberal leader likes to present himself as a fresh, new face ready to rescue Canada from the mean-spirited fear-mongering of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Yet he and his party have pledged to vote for a Conservative anti-terror bill that epitomizes everything Trudeau finds wrong with Harperism.
Even weirder is the fact that the
Liberals admit the bill they plan to support is fundamentally flawed.
As Trudeau acknowledged to a University of British Columbia audience last week,
Bill C-51 is so broad in its scope that it could treat even pipeline protesters as threats to national security.
But he said he’d vote for it anyway — on the hope that it might be amended later.
Reid Morton, a former CSIS director, said on the same radio show that the government must prove why security services need new powers.
“There is certainly, very clearly room for improvement,” he said.
Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien, in a brief to the Commons public safety committee, writes that measures in Bill C-51 requiring government agencies to share information with the security forces cast far too wide a net.
Among other things, he writes, the bill would give Ottawa’s 17 security agencies “virtually limitless power to monitor . . . and profile ordinary Canadians.”
Therrien, a former assistant deputy minister for public safety, has been accused by critics of being too close to the security apparatus. He’s worked on the dark side.
Yet even he doesn’t like Bill C-51.
Not many experts do. The longer it is exposed to scrutiny, the more politically problematic it becomes.
The public may support the bill this week. But will that support be there a month from now?
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The Star