The Toronto Star 18/09/2014 - Ottawa has kept tabs on hundreds of demonstrations across Canada and around the world over the last eight years, from peaceful protests to public university lectures to riots. Newly released documents show about 800 public demonstrations and events were observed and reported on by government departments and law enforcement agencies since 2006. Reports were collected centrally by the Government Operations Centre, an agency tasked with preparing the federal government's response to emergencies. Some were collected by Foreign Affairs on international protests, but the majority focused on domestic events - especially First Nations protests and environmental activism.
Some appear to be media reports detailing the events, but others were prepared by Canada's spy agency, CSIS, and the RCMP. The Conservative government has defended the practice, saying even peaceful protests can go bad and the public's safety must be protected. But the documents, tabled in Parliament, reveal the Government Operations Centre was interested in much more than protests.

Ottawa Citizen 16/09/2014 - The return of MPs to the Hill this week seems to have signalled the beginning of a very long informal election campaign. It seems likely that Canada's response to terrorism will be an issue in that campaign. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and several of his most trusted ministers, such as Jason Kenney, have strong feelings about how we should treat Canadians accused of terrorism, and how we can best fight it overseas. And world events seem likely, unfortunately, to keep terrorism on all our minds. Harper's speech on Monday included a line that attempted to draw a clear ideological line between the Conservatives and their rivals. "We know (terrorists') ideology is not the result of 'social  exclusion' or other so-called 'root causes.' It is evil, vile and must be unambiguously opposed." Conservatives like to use "root causes" as code for naive and simplistic attempts to excuse terrorism as the inevitable result of poverty or some other social factor. But the trouble with speaking in code is that eventually somebody will take you at the plain meaning of your words. As all good Conservatives who read their Aquinas should know, it is nonsensical to suggest that a result can exist without a cause. Are the Conservatives really arguing that terrorism, as an expression of pure evil, just springs up without explanation, like demonic possession? That any one of us might wake up tomorrow possessed of an urge to become a terrorist for no reason whatsoever? Surely there are reasons why one person takes up arms in an evil cause and another does not. To try to understand those reasons, and reduce their effect, is not to shrug at violence. It is in fact a moral duty.

Open Democracy 04/06/2008 (reprint) - At least 200 million of the world's people - between 3% and 5% of its total population - are currently on the move outside their country of origin. Many of these would have preferred to stay where they were if they could. Another untold number would move if they could, but can't. Many simply are looking for better opportunities, as human beings have done for millennia. The realities of globalisation - economic, environmental, familial - mean that these numbers are bound to increase. Migration is perhaps the major issue of our times. It is an issue that dominates the daily lives of people around the world - those who are in transit, and those they leave behind - and preoccupies governments everywhere. At the same time, the measures that have been put in place to deal with migration, and those measures being contemplated, are woefully inadequate. Closing and militarising borders, restricting mobility, criminalising movement, incarcerating and deporting those who somehow manage to arrive in the places closed to them, is not an effective response to the phenomenon of widespread "irregular" global migration; it is merely one more tragic element of the phenomenon itself. It is not working, for migrants, or for the countries trying to control the influx of migrants they see as a "threat". And it is not going to work no matter how much more money, arms and surveillance equipment are invested in border control.

 

These 13 Principles, created by NGOs and legal experts around the world, assert that mass surveillance is a violation of international human rights law. Instead of unchecked surveillance, we should protect the privacy of all people, wherever they live.
 
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