With C-51 now before committee, and the process of hashing out hearing schedules and witness lists begun, the debate continues over its merits. The story about the young Edmonton who went to support ISIS and CSIS didn’t stop her – because they’re not empowered to disrupt – is adding fuel to the fire, while it’s also bringing out a lot of conspiracy theories that are way out there, like ones that state that the terrorism angle is just a smokescreen so that the government can go after environmentalists and First Nations who oppose their resource development projects. (For the record, I have a really hard time seeing that, especially when you start intimating that it’s at the behest of corporations). The question of oversight remains top of mind, particularly as the Liberals are making that the hill they want to die on – or at least fight an election over – to which Philippe Lagassé writes a very interesting piece about the nature of parliamentary oversight committees in comparable Westminster democracies. In particular, these committees and the one that the Liberals have proposed here in Canada is not actually oversight either – it’s a review committee, like SIRC, only broader because it would review all national security agencies as a whole rather than in silos as what little oversight or review mechanisms to do currently (an four years later, talk about better integrating oversight remains just that). More importantly, however, Lagassé notes that opposition parties need to be very careful about how much oversight that they demand parliamentarians have because involving them too much can make them complicit in decisions that they should be holding the government to account for, and by swearing in a group of MPs to secrecy to see the materials, it effectively silences them because they can’t talk about what they know, and it can take such material out of sight and out of mind – as what happened with the Afghan detainee documents. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have more parliamentary review of national security, but we need to be cognisant of its aims and limits.

Good reads:

• Here’s a particularly damning column on the way the Conservatives play politics with the mentally ill who commit crimes.
• It looks like the House of Commons paid the legal fees for those MPs being cited in that failed robocalls court case.
• Scott Gilmore writes a sobering piece on selling fear and how we should stop feeding terrorists.
• Aaron Wherry laments the depths to which the current parliament has plunged in the past few days. (My thoughts: it’s not just the last few days, and it may not be rock bottom).
• The integration of Hill security under an RCMP aegis is to begin almost immediately, despite many unanswered questions.

Odds and ends:

CSE monitors emails to the government, but more importantly stores the metadata from those emails for months or years.

While meeting with Bill Gates, Stephen Harper made a plea to parents to listen to the science of vaccines.

Stephen Maher offers some more perspective on those Press Gallery bylaw changes that erupted into a feud.