By: Andrew Mitrovica
thestar.com
If you are a Canadian citizen, landed immigrant or refugee to this country and you are even the least bit aware of the rights and civil liberties that Canada affords you, then you should be deeply worried today.
Late last week, in its familiar stealth-like fashion, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government shuttered the office of the Inspector General (IG) over Canada’s spy service, CSIS.
The IG acted as the public safety minister’s eyes and ears, monitoring whether or not our powerfully intrusive domestic intelligence service was abiding by its policies and, more important, the law as it went about its key counter-espionage and counter-terrorism responsibilities.
I say “stealth-like” because the Conservative government buried its decision to shut down the IG’s office deep inside a budget bill it tabled last week. If not for the industrious work of Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle, Canadians would have been kept in the dark about this astonishingly wrong-headed decision to pull the plug on the only independent agency that provided some measure of oversight over CSIS’s day-to-day operations.
The IG’s office didn’t have much money or staff to do its important job. Indeed, last year it “enjoyed” a paltry budget of $1 million dollars to go about its work. (A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews heralded the closure of the IG’s office as a cost-saving measure. The million dollar savings will, I’m sure, put a large dent in the federal deficit.)
Historically, despite its laughable lack of resources, the IG’s office has done a more than adequate, if occasionally admirable job, keeping watch over CSIS. The ever-circumspect Eva Plunkett, the last IG, proved to be up to the job, producing incisive annual reports that were sometimes bluntly critical of CSIS.
In 2009, for example, Plunkett raised the alarm over what she believed to the spy service’s failure to abide by new accountability standards established by the Supreme Court of Canada. At the time, Plunkett expressed profound concern over inaccuracies she unearthed about how the spy service went about its “key core activities.”
Plunkett’s predecessors, including Maurice Archdeacon and notably the late David Peel, took their work equally seriously and routinely held CSIS and its leadership to account. Peel, a distinguished former diplomat, was a particularly effective IG from 1994 until his retirement in 1998.
A police-state is as a police-state does.
Well it was to be expected that we would have a homeland security type agency in Canada, because Harper always s does what he is told by the foreign corporate owners of Canada…Right?