"...the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
- John Stuart Mill
 
CALLING ALL Canadians and permanent residents. Your conversations can be electronically bugged, your mail secretly opened, your homes surreptitiously searched, your confidential records clandestinely invaded, and you can be targeted for covert spying. All quite legally. By whom? The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, that's who. The agency has the power to snoop on you in any of the above ways, even though the activity it may be investigating is not unlawful in Canada. The warning comes from Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. He ventures into the subject in the middle of a long interview covering public policy issues that may infringe our basic rights. ``But this is an old song, Alan,'' I say. ``You've been singing it since 1990, and nobody is listening.'' ``Alan continues to sing songs that Alan thinks are important,'' he responds. ``If you are concerned about injustice and impropriety, then you cannot be a slave to fashion or fad.'' His point is in fashion, given the questions surrounding the fundraising activities, among others, of many Tamil Canadians, whom CSIS is accusing of aiding and abetting Tamil Tiger terrorism in Sri Lanka. The CSIS Act empowers our spymeisters to monitor threats to national security. So it should. But it defines them too broadly as ``foreign influenced activities detrimental to Canadian interests;'' activities ``directed toward'' or ``in support'' of violence to achieve a political objective in a foreign state; or acts ``intended ultimately to lead to the overthrow of the Canadian system of government.'' That covers a lot of ground. For example, ``how are CSIS operatives supposed to get evidence of `ultimate intentions?' '' Borovoy asked in a submission to Ottawa. ``Can the word `ultimately' deal with any point between now and the end of time? It is obvious that this language could encourage speculation about the hereafter, rather than evidence from here and now, to serve as the prerequisite for surveillance.'' Not all of CSIS's snooping requires judicial warrants either. Covert spying doesn't. When CSIS does need permission, say, to set a wiretap on your house or office, you will not be informed, let alone invited to court to argue otherwise. And the judge will often rule not on the right or wrong of the probe being proposed but on whether or not it falls within the meaning of the CSIS Act. In investigating serious security-related breaches of the law, Borovoy believes, CSIS ``should draw the line where the law draws the line. It shouldn't use its intrusive powers to monitor lawful activity . . . ``If the government wants to ban fundraising for a particular group abroad, it should say so. ``If people here are raising funds for activities that go to groups that deliberately target innocent non-combatants for violence, I'd not object to such fundraising being made illegal. But the government must say it's unlawful to support such and such. Then we can have a debate.'' Meanwhile, we shouldn't let CSIS use its sweeping powers to endanger our freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and the right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure.
Another concern is police accountability much diluted under the Mike Harris Tories. But the problem transcends ideology, Borovoy says. Politicians of all stripes ``avoid an unpleasant collision with police'' because police enjoy public support. ``People see police as protecting society from evil, and politicians don't want to be seen as going after the guardians of good. So how do you get accountability?'' He has two new ideas:
``That would create some competing pressure on politicians'' to act.
While grand in theory - the idea is not to politicize police - the practice lets governments avoid responsibility and police escape accountability. This is what happened in the 1995 Ipperwash incident in which the OPP shot and killed a native. Harris and his ministers crouched behind the defence that the government doesn't, and didn't, tell the OPP what to do. ``They kept saying, `It's not our business, it's the business of the OPP.' If they were lying, that was unacceptable. It was also unacceptable if they were telling the truth,'' Borovoy says. ``What the hell did they mean it was no business of the government when an operation of that size was building up? If we send 200 troops to do battle against a foreign enemy, we would require a decision by the responsible political authority. But when we send them in to do battle with our own citizens, we don't?''
Other challenges: ``Try and make the welfare state, or what's left of it, more responsive to the values of civil liberties. We need to provide adequate respect for the privacy and dignity of welfare recipients and applicants.'' Guard against technology's many invasions of privacy. Some invasions are legitimate - police wiretapping criminals (with proper warrants), or governments issuing smart cards to coordinate health care. Others are not, but ``we hardly have a clue to what's flowing from all this intrusive new technology.'' We should.
Advice for equality seekers: ``The hardest battles are not when good collides with bad but when good collides with good,'' says the author of When Freedoms Collide. Avoid utopian thinking. ``It's a mistake to try and create heaven on earth. We should try instead to reduce the hell on earth. Otherwise you end up being terribly frustrated and give up.'' Which you shouldn't.
Haroon Siddiqui is The Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Sundays and Thursdays.
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