There is no better cabinet minister in the Trudeau government than Ralph Goodale. He’s intelligent, industrious and savvy in the intricacies of Parliament and the Constitution — a sort of lineal descendant of the late Allan MacEachen and Eugene Forsey.

Goodale worked as hard in Opposition, and then as an MP in the third party days, as he did when he was finance minister — a true rarity in politics. Usually, those who have governed can never quite get used to carrying their own luggage once the chauffeur is gone. The work ethic has a way of vanishing along with the perks.

Not so with Goodale. There was a reason he survived the Liberals’ collapse, the decade in the political wilderness after AdScam. He’s a worker bee, no matter how small the hive — and the people of his Regina-Wascana riding know it.

When the worm turned and the Liberals came back to power, I for one took comfort from the fact that Goodale ended up as Public Safety minister. I felt that way because I knew he would be the one in charge of remaking one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed in Canada: Bill C-51.

It would be a hard task. The Liberals had a lot to answer for over this bill. It was appropriately described as a ‘police state manifesto’ that walked all over the Charter of Rights in hobnailed boots. It greatly and gratuitously increased police power. It extended vast new privacy-invading powers to a security establishment that had never even asked for them. You could not conceive of a less Canadian bill.

And yet, when he was facing an election, Justin Trudeau voted for it. He didn’t want the governing Conservatives going into the 2015 election claiming he was ‘soft on terror’ — perhaps the most abused phrase in the political lexicon these days. Paradox: He voted for something he was against.

But Trudeau attached an important caveat to his support. If elected, he said, he would amend C-51 to do away with some of the legislation’s darker aspects — the ones directly inspired by a series of ministerial directives that preceded C-51 under the Stephen Harper government.

The darkest one came from Goodale’s predecessor at Public Safety, Vic Toews. He signed a secret ministerial directive in 2011 authorizing the use of information obtained through torture. That directive permitted our civilian spy agency to share information with foreign governments even in cases where there was “a substantial risk” of triggering torture against an individual.

Theoretical, you say? It’s as theoretical as Maher Arar’s case was back in 2002.

The Harper government also ordered the Canadian military to share information with allies, even when that likely would lead to torture. More Canadian values.

DND became the fifth federal agency to receive such orders under the Conservatives. The others were CSIS, the RCMP, the Canadian Border Services and what was then known as Communications Security Establishment Canada, Canada’s international and (as it turned out) domestic electronic eavesdropping service.

Although the Liberals conducted a review of the entire national security file in re-working Bill C-51 into Bill C-59, the heart of the matter was the question of what they would do about the torture issue. And there, the redoubtable Ralph Goodale notwithstanding, they have failed. At least, they have if his latest ministerial directives lay out the path the government has chosen.

I’m not saying Goodale didn’t improve on C-51 with his new directives. He did. National security agencies will have to report on compliance matters to a national security committee of parliamentarians. There is a prohibition against disclosing information to a foreign country that poses a “substantial” risk of encouraging torture. And there is a “ban” on using information derived from torture.

Or is there?

Instead of unequivocally banning torture — as the Geneva Conventions do, as the U.S. Supreme Court did when it agreed that the Conventions held for all detainees in U.S. custody — Goodale invoked the principle that guided Toews to his calamitous thumbs-up for torture.

If you allow yourself to use information derived from torture, you’re not combatting the use of torture. You’re promoting it. If you allow yourself to use information derived from torture, you’re not combatting the use of torture. You’re promoting it.

The language is more euphonious, and the spooks have to go through more quasi-public process before they can act. But the bottom line is the same: Under certain circumstances, the Canadian security establishment can use information obtained by torture.

What is that but a re-worded version of the “exceptional circumstances” dodge the Conservatives used to justify using information obtained by torture? If you allow yourself to use information derived from torture, you’re not combatting the use of torture. You’re promoting it.

Apologists for the position adopted by the Liberals and the Conservatives before them like to paint that argument as naive. They often describe a clichéd ticking-time-bomb scenario, an instance where the end justifies the means.

Martin Robbins put this argument best in The Guardian, “If mutilating John Doe’s balls is going to stop a nuclear bomb going off in my favorite London pub, then hand me the curling tongs.”

Ah, a clear dog-whistle to the bloody-minded MAGA crowd. But … what if authorities have the wrong person?

What if the person they have in custody doesn’t actually possess the information they believe he has?

What if the individual is the right person and has the needed information, but there’s a better way of getting it out him? Better than, say, ‘walling’, or waterboarding him 183 times (as was done to Khalid Shaikh Muhammad), or electric shock, sleep and sensory deprivation or attack dogs?

What if torture doesn’t work? Doctors Raj Persaud and Peter Bruggen concluded that it doesn’t, after surveying professional interrogators in the U.S. and other countries.

In fact, no modern advocate of torture has proved that Inquistion tactics do what their practitioners desire — unless you believe the multiple lies told by the CIA. The U.S. Senate didn’t believe them. The Obama government spent $40 million looking into the efficacy of the CIA’s torture program since 9/11. What it found was awful.

The CIA lied about its secret gulag of black torture sites, lied about the number of detainees it held, lied about its extraordinary rendition program, lied about the innocent lives they claimed torture had saved.

It even lied about the role torture played in the search for al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, claiming “enhanced interrogation” had revealed the name of Bin Laden’s courier.

The director of the CIA at that time, Leon Panetta, informed Senator John McCain that that story was false. The information about the courier had actually been obtained using “standard, non-coercive means.”

In the final, massive and damning report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, senators came to this conclusion: “The use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation … The interrogations of CIA detainees was brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policy makers and others.”

The US Army Training Manual, now the Bible for U.S. security agencies on the matter of torture, concurs:

“The use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

Ali Soufan, who interrogated many al Qaida members as a special agent for the FBI, backed up that assertion in Time Magazine:

“When they are in pain, people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they will lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them. That means the information you are getting is useless.”

One of the few remaining advocates of torture — a person who “absolutely” believes that it works — is Donald Trump. Remember when candidate Trump pledged in a TV debate to bring back waterboarding and “worse”? When he said he would like to order U.S. troops to kill the families of terrorists? And that if he gave such an order — which would be wildly illegal under both domestic and international law — the troops would obey him?

Even Trump got whiplash from reversing his position 24 hours later, after 100 prominent Republicans, national security members and Pentagon officials described his comments as “inexcusable.” One of those people is his current defense secretary — the former head of U.S. Central Command, General John Mattis.

Legally and morally, torture should never be in Canada’s intelligence toolkit — even if it is performed by surrogates whose information we merely use.

President Barack Obama observed after receiving the Senate report that the CIA’s torture program did “significant damage” to America’s reputation. Secretary of State John Kerry said that a country “doesn’t have to choose between protecting our security and promoting our values.”

Until Ralph Goodale and the Trudeau government tell us why they have left open the dreadful, degrading option of encouraging torture, they’re offering us nothing more than a better-paved road to the same goal Mr. Harper sought: extracting unreliable information through pain.

The evidence says beer and cigarettes work better.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.