When Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke in favor of cyber security Bill C-13 , he told opponents that he hoped they would drop their opposition to the intrusive new legislation and “support our children.” The implication was clear: we had returned full circle to former Safety Minister Vic Toew’s 2012 assertion that unless you’re in favor of the contentious and privacy-eroding bill, “you’re with the child pornographers”.

Let’s get this out of the way: everyone wants to support children. To begin with, we must support their right to live in a nation where the government does not engage in warrantless wiretapping of its own citizens’ communications, which is a more immediate danger to the vast majority of children than child pornographers. We can also support them by passing a badly needed update to laws dealing with internet sexual blackmail; a reform deliberately bundled alongside Bill C-13's deeply unpopular data-snooping provisions by a government willing to hold children’s online safety hostage in order to advance its agenda of intruding into citizens’ private lives.

While child pornographers are few and far between, government attempts to access private communications have been multiplying at an alarming rate. In one year, the federal government made about 1.2 million warrantless requests to telecommunication companies for data. That’s roughly one request for every thirty-five Canadians. In 2011, these requests were complied with by telecom companies over 780,000 times.

To understand how poorly the Harper government has handled Bill C-13, you must first appreciate just how urgent is the need for legislation that addresses the ‘revenge porn’ phenomenon. Mainstream outrage surrounding this issue was largely prompted by the suicides of 17-year-old Rehteah Parsons and 15-year-old Amanda Todd, both of whom were subject to torment by members of their own community after their explicit photos leaked online. By bundling the controversial data-access provisions of the bill alongside laws that would protect girls like Parsons and Todd, the government seeks to distract from the conversation we should be having about digital consent — whether it pertains to the sharing of data with your telecom provider or sexual images with a partner.

The Harper government has proven again how rhetorically effective it can be to use the trauma of one vulnerable group as the pretense for legislation or lobbying that is actually motivated by strictly political factors. This type of rhetoric creates a false dichotomy between two perceived evils: One, a minimized piece of problematic legislation — Police only need to access to your data sometimes to combat cyber-crime, think of the children! The other, a social problem that can only be resolved in one way — If the government cannot access your data indiscriminately and without a warrant, more teens will commit suicide.

If the bill is not split in two, as critics have demanded, it will devalue the importance of consent whether it passes or not. Canadians have been given the false choice between losing a significant degree of privacy for their personal data or their right to control their own intimate images.

For more news and opinion on Bill C-13, click here.