Instead of playing chicken-little over the American election, it would be nice to dwell on our own failings in Canadian politics. There’s no better place to start than with the man in charge. It’s been a year since Justin Trudeau formed a government and undertook his broad plans to fix the previous ten years of mismanagement and so far, it hasn’t gone swimmingly.
One of the biggest changes that Stephen Harper brought to Canadian politics was a Dick Cheney-style rebuilding of the concept of national security. In the last years of his government, Harper passed two bills accomplishing such. Bill C-24 essentially split Canadian citizenship into either those Canadians with only one passport, or a bunch of Canada-hating foreigners. Additionally, Bill C-51 bestowed powers of surveillance and data collection that would raise eyebrows even at the National Security Agency (NSA).
C-24, for those of you who missed it last time it came up, allowed those with or eligible for dual nationality to be stripped of their Canadian citizenship if charged with terrorism, espionage, or treason. These three charges, incidentally, are the most abstract and difficult to define terms in the legal dictionary, and can be interpreted essentially however law enforcement might wish. One of the first to whom this new law was applied was Zakaria Amara, one of the “Toronto 18,” who was stripped of his Canadian citizenship. It was later returned to him under what Trudeau deemed his “solution” to C-24: C-6.
This new law struck down some but not enough of the changes to Canadian citizenship. The problem is that C-24 was so all encompassing that anything short of a full repeal, which the Liberals mysteriously weren’t game for, would be insufficient to undo the damage to the citizenship code.
Maryam Monsef, Member of Parliament for Peterborough, was recently discovered to have been born in Iran, not Afghanistan as she had thought. She could legally be stripped of Canadian citizenship due to having lied on her citizenship application—a clause mentioned in C-24, but not in C-6—if the authorities were so inclined. It delegitimizes the efforts being made to fully repeal the original legislation and puts a Band-Aid on the gaping wound.
As for C-51, Trudeau and the Liberals haven’t said much, but there doesn’t appear to be any momentum to secure the rights of privacy or freedom of speech for most Canadians. While most of us don’t care about surveillance (after all, we’re all living under the NSA umbrella), we do, or at least should, care about freedom of speech. Part three of the bill amends the criminal code to empower authorities to seize anything they might consider “terrorist propaganda.” The Canadian legal definition of terrorism, much like around the world, is so broad as to have virtually no meaning.
National security is not the only area where Trudeau has fallen short. The year of Trudeau has not been about policy, but about appearances. He shows up at Pride, while keeping the year-long abstinence waiting period before homosexuals can donate blood. He expresses solidarity with Syrian refugees, while only half of the refugees have gotten direct assistance from the government. The new guy has made few meaningful economic reforms and has reversed none of the “security” measures that wouldn’t look out of place in the Soviet Union, but he looks good on your Twitter feed, so you’re probably going to support him again.
