In Ottawa, we have a federal government that this week will finally dismantle the federal long-gun registry. It will do this because it believes that forcing law-abiding gun owners to tell the government what kinds of guns they have is an affront to privacy and liberty.

To supporters of the Conservative government — and to the government itself — the long-gun registry was a a symbol of all that is wrong with so-called Big Brother government.

For similar reasons, the Conservatives changed the rules around the census.

No longer would Canadians be forced, as the Conservative line of the day went, to tell the government how many bathrooms they had in their house or other details about themselves. This, too, was seen as triumph for those whose rallying cry is “Government Off Our Backs!”

And yet, on Tuesday, this very same government tabled new legislation which would give police, spies and federal bureaucrats from the Competition Bureau the power to collect information about the digital services Canadians use without first obtaining a warrant from a judge.

There is no excuse for this kind of intrusion on the privacy rights of Canadians and certainly not one from a government that says it champions the idea that the federal government ought to respect individual liberties and rights.

“It’s just outrageous,” Ann Cavoukian, the internationally respected privacy commissioner of Ontario, said in a TV interview. “There’s no need for it. Zero.”

At a press conference Tuesday, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said this new bill would involve “a minimum of intrusion on the privacy of Canadians.” So Nicholson admits there is “an intrusion” of privacy. Well, the long-form census was far less intrusive and the Conservatives went to the mat to kill that!

And yet, the Conservatives are happy to pass into law a bill that includes this: When a telecom services provider is presented with a written request from a cop, a spy or a bureaucrat — remember, no judge will be involved — “every telecommunications service provider must provide the (requester) with identifying information in the service provider’s possession or control respecting the name, address, telephone number and electronic mail address of any subscriber to any of the service provider’s telecommunications services and the Internet protocol address and local service provider identifier that are associated with the subscriber’s service and equipment.”

NDP MP Charlie Angus is quite right when he said Tuesday that this bill “will treat every law-abiding Canadian citizen as a potential criminal.

This is a bill that does away with the long-standing provisions that protect the basic rights of Canadians to ensure that when the police want to go after you, when they want to follow you, want to snoop on you, they have to do it with warrants.”

Toews would have you believe that the NDP, civil rights advocates, privacy commissioners and other opponents of this draconian legislation support child pornographers, the bill’s alleged target. Baloney.

The bill lets bureaucrats from the Competition Bureau get personal details without a warrant. The Competition Bureau is now tracking down kiddie porn perverts?

All Toews has done is cave to pressure from a law enforcement lobby to create a shortcut that does away with important judicial oversight of the investigators. That’s about as Big as Big Government gets.

“We’re worried about a 1984 scenario,” Liberal MP Marc Garneau said, referencing George Orwell’s famous police-state dystopia.

All Canadians should be worried, too.

david.akin@sunmedia.ca