Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had hoped to stickhandle their way past Stephen Harper’s sweeping new anti-terror bill. The strategy could backfire.

It could backfire because it contradicts everything Trudeau claims to stand for.

The Liberal leader likes to present himself as a fresh, new face ready to rescue Canada from the mean-spirited fear-mongering of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Yet he and his party have pledged to vote for a Conservative anti-terror bill that epitomizes everything Trudeau finds wrong with Harperism.

Even weirder is the fact that the Liberals admit the bill they plan to support is fundamentally flawed.

As Trudeau acknowledged to a University of British Columbia audience last week, Bill C-51 is so broad in its scope that it could treat even pipeline protesters as threats to national security.

But he said he’d vote for it anyway — on the hope that it might be amended later.

Trudeau’s stated reasoning, as revealed in a Huffington Post video of that UBC speech, is unusual.

He told his audience that the bill is not one that he would have put forward. Yet he said that if his opposition party were to oppose the bill, the government might be so miffed that it would refuse to amend it.

“I don’t want to encourage them to not make those amendments,” he said.

It’s an interesting rationale. If Liberals MPs were to apply this working-from-within strategy consistently, they would always support the Conservatives.

But I suspect that this novel approach to Westminster democracy is not the only reason behind Trudeau’s strangely contradictory approach to Bill C-51.

In an election year, Liberals do not want to be on the wrong side of public opinion. Polls suggest the public supports stronger anti-terror measures. Ergo . . . .

But here the Liberals have failed to take into account the government’s own ineptitude. After last fall’s dramatic Parliament Hill attack, it should have been simple to get an anti-terror bill through the Commons.

But this government has severely overreached. Its omnibus terror bill has unsettled not just the usual suspects but much of the security establishment.

Ron Atkey, who formerly headed the body that oversees the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told CBC Radio Tuesday that Bill C-51 goes too far and “badly needs improvement.”

He pointed particularly to measures that would allow CSIS, with judicial approval, to override the Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Reid Morton, a former CSIS director, said on the same radio show that the government must prove why security services need new powers.

“There is certainly, very clearly room for improvement,” he said.

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Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien, in a brief to the Commons public safety committee, writes that measures in Bill C-51 requiring government agencies to share information with the security forces cast far too wide a net.

Among other things, he writes, the bill would give Ottawa’s 17 security agencies “virtually limitless power to monitor . . . and profile ordinary Canadians.”

Therrien, a former assistant deputy minister for public safety, has been accused by critics of being too close to the security apparatus. He’s worked on the dark side.

Yet even he doesn’t like Bill C-51.

Not many experts do. The longer it is exposed to scrutiny, the more politically problematic it becomes.

The public may support the bill this week. But will that support be there a month from now?

More to the point for the Liberals, when election time comes, will voters think of Trudeau as a strong leader tough on terror?

Or will they view him as a feckless opportunist who was willing to temporize on civil liberties for short-term political advantage?

In a speech Monday, Trudeau laid into the Harper Conservatives as illiberal and divisive. He accused them of stoking fear.

He said the Liberals, by contrast, believe in liberty, freedom and the Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

He did not talk about how a fear-based bill that he and his party support would diminish those rights, liberties and freedoms. He did not mention Bill C-51.

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

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