Once upon a time, not so long ago,
the Liberals auditioned for government in Ottawa
with a promise to do away with obnoxiously enormous omnibus bills, in which dozens of separate issues are crammed into the same legislation.
The usual result, often by design, is that contentious issues don’t get the scrutiny they deserve. The Liberals long ago having discovered that they only dislike omnibus bills when Conservatives draft them, the party’s 2025 platform wisely did not promise any change on that front.
And they’re right out of the gate with a doozie
of an omnibus bill: Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, which seems likely to keep many lawyers gainfully employed for years fighting and defending it in court.
There are two main objections to the bill: New restrictions on who can apply for asylum status in Canada; and making it easier for police to obtain your internet-user information. It’s certainly conceivable that the latter might help police make the border safer. It could disrupt smuggling operations, be they fentanyl, drugs or human beings.
But if you go look at the bill
, you’ll see these new measures aren’t about the border. They’re about
everything
.
Section 487.0121 would allow police, without a warrant, to ask an internet service provider (ISP) if someone is a subscriber; whether the ISP “possesses … any information … in relation to that subscriber” (though it wouldn’t grant access to specific data); the city in which the ISP’s services were provided; and when the services were provided.
Police must only demonstrate they had “reasonable grounds to suspect (that) an offence has been or will be committed under this Act
or any other Act of Parliament
” (my italics).
Producing additional data attached to IP addresses would require a warrant, but not in “exigent circumstances.” Do you trust police and courts to assure exigency? I don’t.
You don’t often hear Canadian police forces argue they have all the tools they need to fight crime. And there’s a long history of Canadian governments, Conservative and Liberal alike, leveraging hot-button issues to try to broaden police or intelligence-service powers. Then public safety minister
Vic Toews immortalized himself in 2012
defending internet-monitoring legislation by suggesting Canadians can either “stand with us or with the child pornographers,” but other governments have used terrorism, “revenge porn” and other justifications in the past.
This sure looks like an attempt to leverage Trumpian mayhem for the same purposes. It will and should be fought on those grounds.
It’s especially unfortunate because Bill C-2 also proposes to inject some relatively hardhearted sanity into our perennially out-of-control refugee system — changes that by rights would be debated on their own, without invoking Donald Trump’s name every 30 seconds, because these problems are not at all of the president’s making. For example, Bill C-2 proposes a one-year deadline for being in Canada, after which you won’t be able to apply for asylum, which is a clear response to the number of temporary residents trying to hang on in Canada using the refugee system. And it proposes expanding the Safe Third Country Agreement such that anyone crossing illegally from the U.S. would be ineligible to claim asylum, no matter how long they lie low upon arrival.
These are reasonable measures, completely in keeping with countries with far better human-rights records than Canada’s. Someone doesn’t just suddenly remember being persecuted after a year of not mentioning it. The principle of seeking asylum in the first technically safe country you arrive in may be unrealistic: no one willing to risk their lives for a better life in the United States or Canada is likely to settle on Mexico, considering
the ordeals most refugees from Central America have already been through.
But when a country like Canada accepts hundreds of refugee claims a year from the U.S and Europe, you know things have been taken to an extreme.
Providing asylum to transgender Americans
is one of Canadian progressives’ causes du jour. Providing asylum to transgender people in less developed countries, including far scarier places to be transgender — Uganda, Honduras, Nigeria, Russia — is of conspicuously less concern, for two basic reasons: One, as ever, we enjoy sticking it to Uncle Sam; and two, most casual refugee advocacy in this country is 100 per cent predicated on what we see and hear in the news.
Canadians hear roughly 100 per cent more news about Trump’s America than they do from the rest of the world (except sometimes news about Canada) combined.
The United States has several transgender “sanctuary cities,”
from Los Angeles to Madison, Wis., to Boston to New York City. Not to say it’s
easy
to live anywhere in Trump’s America as a transgender person … but then, we’re constantly told how godawful it is to live in
Canada
as a transgender person.
A parliamentary petition sponsored by Green MP Elizabeth May
proposes that the unspecified, supposedly ongoing “removal of Canadian federal rights and freedoms of the 2SLGBTQIA+ target group be considered a form of genocide.”
Refugee advocates will argue, reasonably enough, that the solution for a self-styled humanitarian beacon like Canada would be to devote enough resources to the refugee-determination system such that we could adjudicate them quickly and efficiently. But no government ever,
ever
does that. We have a backlog of 280,825 asylum claims — roughly 0.7 per cent of the Canadian population.
Something has to give. And that something has absolutely nothing to do with Canadians’ IP addresses.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
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