Roundup: It wasn’t terrorism, but support our anti-terror bill

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With the House back this week, we are likely to see debate resume on the new anti-terrorism bill – something that Peter MacKay was talking up over the weekend with regard to the alleged Halifax shooting plot, despite the assurances that the would-be shooters weren’t actually terrorists and were caught using existing tools. Through this, a former assistant director of CSIS says the tools are necessary because CSIS is built for the Cold War, and they really need these new tools to actively disrupt terrorist networks. Sure, that may be, but there remains the gaping flaw in terms of oversight, and another former CSIS agent spoke to the media, pointing out that without that oversight, we’ll see more cases where CSIS sanitizes their files before they hand them over to SIRC. As well, said agent warns that the provisions in the bill are likely to open up a whole area of secret jurisprudence which is alarming, and says that the Prime Minister making vaguely threatening statements like “tentacles of jihadism reaching us” could actually fan the flames and make things worse. So there’s that. Two professors who study national security laws weigh in on the bill, and while they see a few merits in it, they have a number of concerns and yes, the lack of oversight is one of the most alarming portions of it. And no, a judicial warrant is not a sufficient safeguard considering that we have documented cases where CSIS was found to have misled the very court it asked for a warrant from. That is a very big problem, and one that the Supreme Court is going to weigh in on sometime later this year.

Good reads:

  • The sour grapes committee of red-lit wannabe Liberal nomination candidates grumbles about Eve Adams.
  • There are concerns that maintenance and support work at the RCN will start going to civilian contractors.
  • A preliminary study suggests that soldiers are more likely than civilians to have faced or witnessed abuse in childhood.
  • The tale of the Victims of Communism memorial gets more bizarre with the news that the organizers are selling spaces to mark donors on said monument.

Odds and ends:

Conservative MP Joy Smith wants you to boycott Fifty Shades of Grey, because apparently Pretty Woman made a generation think that prostituion was glamorous. No, really.

The government is expected to table back-to-work legislation for CP Rail today.

For the 50th anniversary of our flag, Trudeau and Jean Chrétien held a big rally in the GTA, while the Governor General had a presentation in Ottawa, and the Queen sent her regards.