Justin Trudeau’s decision to back controversial new anti-terror laws says much about him and his Liberal party.

It says first that the Liberals don’t want to be on the wrong side of what they believe to be public opinion, that they are determined not to be caught flatfooted if Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes national security an election issue.

That is the crassly political element of Trudeau’s acquiescence.

But the party’s decision to vote for Harper’s Bill C-51 shows something else as well.

It shows that the Liberals agree with the Conservatives that civil rights aren’t that important.

They agree that a revamped Canadian Security Intelligence Service should be able, with the secret approval of a judge, to override those rights.

They agree that Canadian spooks should get back into the business of dirty tricks. They agree on provisions that would criminalize any behaviour deemed to interfere with the financial and economic stability of Canada.

They agree with loosening the criteria under which people may be charged with terrorist offences. They agree with amending the Criminal Code to let judges impose house arrest on suspects for up to five years without trial.

They agree on broad new constraints to free speech.

The key area in which Trudeau’s Liberals disagree with Harper, it seems, is that they want a parliamentary committee to oversee Canada’s security agencies.

In theory, this sounds good. In practice, as I wrote earlier this week, legislative oversight rarely amounts to much.

It would be easy to blame this all on chronic Liberal faintheartedness. However, in other areas Trudeau has been rather bold.

He called for the legalization of marijuana at a time when public opinion polls were not in his favour. He risked internal party discord by unilaterally expelling sitting senators from the Liberal caucus.

He bucked party warhorses (and public opinion) by refusing to sign onto Harper’s air campaign in Iraq.

Yet on basic civil liberties, he is willing to take a pass.

At first blush, this seems odd. Trudeau is careful not to talk about much. With a few notable exceptions, the Liberals are keeping their views on most matters under wraps until the election campaign begins.

But one area the Liberal leader has spoken about is his love of the Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a charter that came to pass largely because of his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

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“It is our enduring responsibility as Canadians to ensure that these rights and freedoms are always upheld and preserved, never devalued or diminished,” Justin Trudeau said in one 2013 paean to the charter.

Now he and his fellow Liberal caucus members are proposing to support just such a diminishment.

In fact, the Liberals have long had a complex approach to civil rights. They like such rights in the abstract but sometimes — as they did when they introduced Canada’s first anti-terrorism law in 2001 — find them a nuisance.

Pierre Trudeau himself expressed that contradiction. It was at his insistence that the charter was written into Canada’s 1982 Constitution.

But he was also the prime minister who, in 1970, famously suspended civil liberties across the country in the wake of two separatist kidnappings.

Trudeau’s use of the War Measures Act allowed, among other things, censorship and arrest without charge. Hundreds were arrested in Quebec. The public outside of Quebec cheered.

In the Commons, only 16 New Democrats had the nerve to oppose the Liberal government’s blatant disregard of human rights.

Yet just a few years later, the public mood changed. Politicians who had supported the suspension of civil liberties, including former Conservative leader Robert Stanfield, acknowledged that they had made a mistake – that the War Measures Act was overkill.

Pierre Trudeau never apologized. But at some level, his later campaign for a constitutionally entrenched charter of rights can be seen as an act of penance.

Now Justin Trudeau is facing his own War Measures Act moment. Instead of supporting civil liberties, he is aiding and abetting the Harper government’s attack on these rights. What will his penance be?

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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