Soft On Terror?

The Anti-Terrorism Act is indeed a difficult piece of legislation, one on which people can and will honestly disagree. It was put in place by the Chrétien government in the wake of the September 11^th terrorism attacks and now needs to be renewed.

Parliament is totally divided on the issue. The Conservatives call it an essential piece of their strategy to fight terrorism and several Liberal tenors including Anne McLellan, John Manley and Irwin Cotler have voiced their support for the bill. Bob Rae, who chaired the Air India inquiry, also concluded it was a necessary measure to deal with terrorism.

On the other hand, a majority of Liberal MPs, along with the NDP and the Bloc, oppose the act because of the key civil liberties it violates. They cite a recent unanimous Supreme Court ruling calling for the abolishment of security certificates, as the issues raised by that ruling are comparable to the ones raised by the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Sounds like a deadlock to me, time for a compromise. This is what the opposition parties had in mind when they created a committee to improve the bill. This committee has met regularly for the past few months, and has prepared a number of suggestions for the government.

You’d think that a government which calls this Act an essential piece of its strategy to fight terrorism would move quickly to implement these suggestions and get it passed by Parliament. If that’s what you think, you obviously haven’t gotten to know the Conservatives well enough yet.

As could have been expected, Harper’s government implemented NONE of the committee’s suggestions. They preferred to use the bill as yet another opportunity to call the Liberals soft on terror.

As far as I’m concerned, the party which is soft on terror is the one which refuses to implement suggestions from a parliamentary committee out of sheer political opportunism.