10 David Lyon and David Murakami Wood
the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 1984. However, the post9/11 environment has once again muddied the never entirely clear blue waters that separate CSIS’s security intelligence role from the RCMP’s policing mandate. As CSIS has grown in power and influence, pressure has grown for it to have more active capabilities to – in the words of the National Security Act, 2017 (formerly Bill C-59) – “disrupt” terrorist plots and so on. In addition, the RCMP still maintains what can only be described as a political policing role, akin to the Special Branch of London’s Metropolitan Police, targeting what it describes as “domestic” or “multi-issue extremists” (who include environmental activists, Indigenous peoples’ rights organizations, Quebecois separatists, and more).16 As a result, CSIS has developed its own extensive databases, in line with the US Department of Homeland Security’s “fusion centers,” created after 9/11. There are multiple proposals in Canada for similar organizations to share data and cooperate operationally, following a model that was tested for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.17 By 2010, Canada was four years into the decade-long government of Stephen Harper, who had promised to change Canada “beyond recognition.” This seems far-fetched, particularly in retrospect and in the long-term historical view taken here, but there were a number of key changes in the area of security intelligence with which the country is still wrestling. Harper’s approach in general was to favour increasing the legal powers of state security intelligence organizations, with a corresponding reduction in human rights, particularly privacy. Arguments over what became known as “lawful access” were not a consistent factor over Harper’s ten years in power but became increasingly important, particularly after 2009. Successive public safety ministers, Peter van Loan and Steven Blaney, and Justice Ministers Rob Nicholson and Peter MacKay, and above all Vic Toews, who held both portfolios at different times, joined Harper in these attempts to enact legislation giving police and security intelligence greater powers. The initial push in 2009 came through two bills: Bill C-46, the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act, and Bill C-47, the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act. Key features, which were to recur in almost all later bills, centred on allowing warrantless police access to many aspects of Internet communications. Security fears associated with the Vancouver Winter Olympics may have had something to do with it, but terrorism, serious crime, and other threats were cited. Although this pair of bills did not attract enough support, a second attempt came in 2011 with Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, whose title demonstrates the kind of rhetoric deployed to justify lawful access provisions. This again failed.
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