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All of these steps create problems on the civil liberties front. As presented, Bill C-51 makes a Swiss cheese out of due process, and the three national political parties have approached the problem from distinctly different angles. The government have swaddled themselves in Stephen Harper’s default-toga of protecting the public, aspersing civil liberties concerns, and uttering tired pieties that “the law enforcement agencies are on our side,” presumably referring to their objectives rather than their political preferences. It is easy to be cynical about this and resignedly conclude that Vic Toews and Julian Fantino ride again (itself a terrorizing thought, and thought-terror is assumedly covered in the vast sweep of this bill). The government is responsible for preventing terrorist outrages from happening and it has to be given some licence to protect the country and everyone in it. But it is hard to be overly sanguine about the medieval antics of the government that took the giant leap backwards that was the omnibus crime bill. Nor is it reassuring that Mr. Harper, as is his frequent custom, is imposing a shortened debate on Parliament.

The New Democrats and their leader, Thomas Mulcair, deserve credit for tackling this sloppily worded measure head on

The Liberals have accepted the bill but claim to seek a clearer and heavier oversight than is now provided. This has been much mocked as toadying to reactionary opinion, but again, it is an attempt to reconcile the conflicting goals — though the unofficial opposition is no more specific about increased oversight than the government is about the many open-ended powers it wants to give the whole range of law enforcement agencies. The New Democrats and their leader, Thomas Mulcair, deserve credit for tackling this sloppily worded measure head on. He and his colleagues have said that the failure to give more precision to “disrupt” and many other new official rights is careless, that anyone protesting even the construction of a pipeline could be a target for some of these actions, and that there is insufficient focus on “deradicalization,” but that the NDP could support a bill adequately clarified.