Munirul-Haq Raza
Contributor
Now a new bill, Bill C-30, is being put forward by Vic Toews, Canada’s public safety minister. The bill would force telecommunication companies like Rogers and Bell to create backdoor access to personal information without a warrant and install equipment for real-time surveillance, creating new bureaucratic powers that undermine privacy.
According to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, “This would enable police to link a named individual with a cell phone number, email address, and IP address among other things. […] including an otherwise anonymous online comment or internet browsing history.”
The Conservatives argue that they need this bill to stop exploitation on the internet by pedophiles. But critics say the bill would go too far and require the surveillance of activities of everyday citizens and allow for their personal information to be surrendered at times without a warrant.
I understand that child pornography needs to be fought. But at what cost would we be stopping child pornography or cyber crime? A lot of what the bill intends to do is go beyond protection and into dangerous territory by creating a surveillance system that we may not be able to turn back from.
It allows for personal information to be obtained in certain circumstances without a warrant, creating suspicion and paranoia. It creates a community that has us monitoring child pornographers and ordinary Canadians, and putting them in the same boat.
We cannot make a safer society by simply becoming a police state. There are other countries that have also taken up the task of monitoring their citizens, like China and North Korea, and they have essentially used this mechanism to stop and control dissent in the country.
The warrantless provision seems to be the most troubling part of the bill and needs to be removed or amended so that subscriber information should only be obtained under a warrant.
Canada should be setting an example in preserving freedoms, not becoming a follower of other countries who have given into monitoring their citizens’ every action. I agree that we should continue fighting child pornography, but there are other options that we have yet to explore.
