Monday, April 21, 2008

Yet another Liberal sellout of Canadians

Last year the Liberals helped kill the two most draconian provisions of the deeply undemocratic 2001 terror laws package, preventative detention and compelled testimony. "The government needs to do more than just repair these defective clauses," Ignatieff said then. "The entire architecture of Canada's anti-terrorism laws requires substantial amendment."

That was then, when there was political hay to be made in differentiating the Liberals under Dion from both the Harper government and the Liberal's own recent Martin era that passed the laws in the first place.

This is now.

However, the Liberals themselves were split, with many prominent figures arguing that both powers should be kept.
So it should come as no surprise that the Liberals have – again – changed their minds. The Harper government has passed in the Senate and introduced into the Commons a new bill to reimplement slightly amended versions of both measures. Now, the Liberals say they will support them. In fact, the Liberals now use the same arguments once employed against them.
"We recognize that this is necessary," public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh said in an interview this week. "Other countries have much more stringent laws."
To explain his party's latest about-face, Dosanjh points to three new provisions.
One would make police prove that they had exhausted all other reasonable means before bringing someone before an investigative hearing; a second would require the government to annually justify the two measures; a third would slightly narrow the grounds for detaining someone without charge.
However, these amendments are considerably more modest than the Liberal demands of 14 months ago. Then the Liberals insisted that the government had to rethink all aspects of the anti-terror laws.
"The government needs to do more than just repair these defective clauses," Ignatieff said then. "The entire architecture of Canada's anti-terrorism laws requires
substantial amendment."
As part of that sweeping re-evaluation, he said then, preventive detention should be scrapped entirely since it was "in our judgment, strictly unnecessary."
But in the bill that the Liberals now say they will support, none of this sweeping change has happened. Indeed, even fairly minor changes suggested by all-party Commons and Senate committees have been ignored.

Anyone surprised by such enthusiastic compromise and duplicity on the part of the Liberals really hasn't been paying attention. Some of us said quite awhile ago that the Liberal's opposition to renewing the anti-terror provisions was purely expediency.

Spotted by Alison at Creekside, which is good because you sure haven't seen much about it in the MSM have you?

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