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The proposed Strong Borders Act gives police new invasive search powers that may breach Charter rights

theconversation.com

The proposed Strong Borders Act gives police new invasive search powers that may breach Charter rights

Author: Robert Diab | Professor, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University

5 comments

  • Who actually wrote this bill? Was this some lobby/thinktank/special interest group that fed it through to the government? I'm getting tired of not knowing who's behind all this crap, and it keeps having a similar smell.

  • Any company that provides Canadians with a service that stores or transmits information ... can be told to install “any device, equipment or other thing."

    There are no "safeguards" other than that the devices or systems so installed should not "introduce a systemic vulnerability." As we have all been repeatedly reminded by recent events one cannot arbitrarily add surveillance features to every Internet service without them coming with new attack surfaces that will inevitably introduce new vulnerabilities. That it will be unintentional when it happens is not such a great safeguard. There are many other problems with the bill, but that part in particular is so obviously egregious that I can't understand why there still isn't more reporting that explains or at least acknowledges just how crazy it is.

    • I mean it's not just "unsettling" for lawyers. It's a law that clearly has no place in anything meant to resemble a democracy. It ought to be a major scandal that anyone thought it would be acceptable to even propose it.

      It almost seems insulting that they didn't employ more subterfuge. Normally when the forces of evil want to advance the country towards totalitarianism they'll be clever about it, as with the previous government's C-63 which would've opened the door for a newly-created regulator to do some similar things specifically to social media. At least last year they thought it was worth the effort to try and look respectable and provide a rationale, a cover story for what they wanted to do.

      This one it's just "we hereby grant ourselves the power to install a backdoor for the spies in every Internet service that's available in Canada." Don't worry, it'll be properly authorized spies only — with a few new additions to who gets authorized — and it'll be totally secure. It's like those videos on youtube that exist solely for the purpose of infringing someone's copyright and we're meant to assume that it's legally okay because the description says "no copyright infringement intended." It's the border security bill, no security or privacy risks intended.

      There are plenty of other things in there that could more aptly be described as unsettling, where the implications aren't entirely clear to me such as with the money laundering stuff. If they scrap the completely nonsensical part the committee will still have its work cut out for it in evaluating the rest.

  • This is what we get from "strategic voting". Scrap the system, start over. Decolonize your minds.

  • For all the alarmists acting like this is going to pass...it won't. This is part of the normal process that all new legislation goes through. Politicians propse a bill, which contains everything they can think to include...throwing it all at the wall, just to see what will stick. Then it gets torn to shreds during the debate session, by legal advocacy groups and human rights organizations, who know exactly what kinds of legal challenges they can see coming a mile away. Anything that's garaunteed to get tossed out in court is discarded from the legislation.

    Why? Because there's no point in passing legislation that can't actually be legally enforced. Law enforcement has been trying to get these kinds of "tools" implemented for decades. And the courts have all said, all the way along...no. You need a warrant for that kind of intrusion. They need probable cause to look at these things. They need a reasonable justification beyond, "I want to look, just in case". None of the shit in this bill is going to pass the legal smell test. Period.