Hi. This blog is probably going to be short-lived, but hopefully it will contribute something to people's understanding of bill C-51, the "Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015".
As a part of my job, I am required to keep up on laws that affect privacy and information security in Canada. But, disclaimer: I'm not a legal expert of any kind, whatsoever, at all, not even slightly. But I do sometimes find myself reading legislation and trying to understand what it means, so that I can explain the important parts to other people. When I have to do that, I always preface my comments with something like "if you need an official opinion, you should ask a lawyer, but here's what I currently understand" - and anything said in this blog should be read with that proviso. I might get some things wrong, but I'll do my best not to.
Right now (March 25th, 2015) a piece of legislation with some deeply disturbing provisions is at committee. What "at committee" means is that it's passed the House of Commons twice, and now has gone off into a process that is meant to allow Members of Parliament to hear from members of the public who are interested in having a say on the bill, and have some expertise or a unique perspective to offer. In the next couple of weeks, the committee hearings will finish, and the bill will go before the House of Commons for a third and final time. At which point, unless Canadians make it VERY clear to our elected representatives that voting for the bill will cost them politically, the bill will pass the House, and go on to be debated in the Senate, where it will probably pass too. I say that because the current government has a majority in both the House and the Senate, so unless the opposition and some government members vote against it, it will pass.
I don't have any party or political affiliations, and I don't intend to start now. Although I have opinions about things, I'm not normally someone who engages in political debate unless I see someone say something particularly stupid and I can't help myself. The first time in my entire life that I wrote my MP was a few weeks ago, about this bill. I'm going to take some of my evenings and weekends until the bill has come and gone, and explain, to the best of my ability, what's wrong with it, and why people like me who have never expressed their opinion to their MP before, should consider doing so. The short answer is "because this bill affects all of us, not just terrorists, and maybe they'll listen".
Lots of people have already explained a lot of things about this bill, and some of them are better at it than me. If you want some of the best I've found in a month and a half of research, go to antiterrorlaw.ca. But there's enough information out there that it can be overwhelming, so this blog will be a curated list of the things I think are most important to understand, or that people seem to be misunderstanding a lot. I'll try to keep the individual blog posts bite-sized, although I'm not good at that so be prepared for some reading. But 10 minutes a day for a week or so, reading about this, is worth it to understand a bill that gives our government and our intelligence services much more sweeping powers. Most bills, I go "meh". But this one's important.
