Friday, June 19, 2009

Ottawa sees to it that Canadians forfeit more of their rights and freedoms.






Today’s Ottawa Citizen: MPs recommend random roadside breath tests


A parliamentary committee has recommended that police officers be given the power to conduct random roadside breath tests on drivers, a change that would remove the legal requirement for officers to have a "reasonable" suspicion that drivers are drunk.

Today’s Toronto Star: Will police get easier access to emails?


Canada's police and security forces would get greater access to the Internet and wireless telecommunications records of millions of Canadians under a bill tabled yesterday by the federal Conservatives.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are they going to change the national anthem to Waltzing Mathilda as well?

Geez, Harper, we're not as authoritarian as the Aussies (where both of these ideas come from).

Anonymous said...

"Rights and freedoms" are loosey-goosey concepts for the Harper Tory Party. Facts and law will be whatever One Guy wants the facts and law to be.

===================================================

Paul Koring
From Friday's Globe and Mail, Friday, Jun. 19, 2009 08:33AM EDT
Washington attempted to elicit the Harper government's help in putting Abousfian Abdelrazik behind bars, even though American anti-terrorist agents admitted they lacked sufficient evidence to charge him.

Government censors – in a rare failure to black out anything incriminating – let slip a “secret” document, dated July 19, 2006, that reveals a critical set of high-level exchanges between the administration of George W. Bush and the Stephen Harper government.

It was part of a trove of several hundred pages, many of them entirely blacked out, that were released by the government in response to a Privacy Act request by Mr. Abdelrazik.

The document, marked “secret,” shows that the Bush administration knew Sudan was about to release Mr. Abdelrazik from prison in the summer of 2006, and wanted help from Canadian police and anti-terrorism agents to try to charge him.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-asked-canada-to-help-build-acase-against-abdelrazik/article1188268/

Dr Mike said...

I am all for removing pedophiles & drunk guys from our streets but we are walking a fine line here.

It is easy to say that the security forces will not abuse the power.

It is also easy to say you have nothing to fear unless you do something wrong.

The problem is that when this type of power becomes common-place , then there is usually some dimwit just waiting to try & take advantage.

Also the notion of wrongful "guilty as charged" comes to mind.

Dr Mike Popovich

KC said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
KC said...

Well the committee can't recommend anything without a majority--which the Conservatives don't have on their own. You can't tell from the article but presumably the new "tough on crime" Liberals helped them along on this.