Canada Rejects Anti-Terror Laws 507
Coryoth writes "The Canadian parliament has voted against renewing anti-terror laws that had been introduced after September 11, 2001. The rejected laws included provisions to hold terror suspects indefinitely, and to compel witnesses to testify, and were in some sense Canada's version fo the Patriot Act. The laws were voted down in the face of claims from the minority Conservative government that the Liberal Party was soft on terror, and despite the fact that Canada has faced active terrorist cells in their own country. The anti-terror laws have never been used, and it was viewed that they are neither relevant, nor needed, in dealing with terrorist plots. Hopefully more countries will come to the same conclusion."
Oh Canada! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh No! The Maple Syrup Supply is unsafe! (Score:3, Insightful)
Hold the phone... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a good thing this abhorent measure is gone, because it was a crutch to avoid the due dilligence in proving guilt before innocence.
Article ignores politican context (Score:4, Insightful)
Oil pipelines? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of targets up here that WILL hurt you.
Re:Oh No! The Maple Syrup Supply is unsafe! (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the US import most of its oil from Canada. Hitting Canada would have a dramatic effect on the US.
Best News all Day... Well, Sorta... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sometimes I really wonder how long this country has at the rate we are going. Just take a look at Democracy Now or any alternative site - or better yet, just go to news.yahoo.ca/ for a slightly less baised mainstream news look at the U.S.(far less filtering than the stuf we get from Reuters/CNN/Fox/etc main newsfeeds). The sad thing is that it's the working class what will take the brunt of any retaliation for what we are doing - be it military, terrorist, economic, or otherwise.
Re:Oh Canada! (Score:5, Insightful)
<rant>
My theory goes something like this. No matter what you do, it's most often politicians and not visionaries who get voted into office, if for no other reason than they lie better. This leaves you with leaders who are more concerned with their best interest rather than the people's, which results in a corrupt government. Also, majority governments can ram through just about whatever they want, whereas minority governments have to negotiate and compromise. Another way to say this is majority governments are effective, while minority governments are ineffective. So given the two likeliest choices of a corrupt effective government and a corrupt ineffective government, I'll choose the latter. At least they have a harder time shafting us.
</rant>
Hey, if you can't rant about politics, what can you rant about?
Re:Article ignores politican context (Score:5, Insightful)
We are fully aware that people like you (the bad people) are out there trying take away our liberties for the smallest and most false sense of security. Thats why we applaud this. Its a victory against you bad people. Don't worry we know you exist!
Re:Makes me proud to be Canadian. (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh... true in a funny way. A good day for law-abiding Canadians who don't want to let the terrorists win by tricking them out of their civil liberties. And good news for terrorists who want to operate more effectively in Canada. Both groups win by their own measures of success.
Re:Thanks for visiting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come now, I think calling Molson "beer" is being a bit generous. Sure, it has less resemblance to water than the mainstream US brands (Budweiser, Millers, etc.), but calling it "beer" is just taking things a bit too far.
Re:Oh Canada! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fundamental difference (Score:5, Insightful)
/Yes, I know that the drug cartels you were referring to have nothing to do with Aspirin. I merely used them as an example because Aspirin is generally considered 'harmless' by most people.
Re:Makes me proud to be Canadian. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Article ignores politican context (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they should. And everyone else is free to spread anti-hate literature that points out the small-minded flaws of the hate literature. It's a good thing for hateful people to make known the extent of their insanity, so that the rest of us can guard against it. Make it illegal, and they go underground, and they feel that their rights are being oppressed, and they are more likely to become violent. Picture a water balloon, with the balloon being the hater and the water being the hate. Leave it alone, and nothing is likely to happen. Squeeze it, and it'll pop.
Re:"He's a Jedi, 17 times, eh?" (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Article ignores politican context (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes me proud to be Canadian. (Score:1, Insightful)
By the same token: If the powers granted by the legislation were never used, and civil liberties of Canadians were never effectively squashed, then that's a pretty shallow victory for citizens.
Really I think this is an insignificant victory in any sense if you're looking at real world impact. It's a victory of principle, and an important victory of principle. As a Canadian, I'm glad to see that many politicians are doing a good job in preventing civil liberties from sliding away. Admittedly the bill was defeated out of politics rather than principle, but nonetheless, principle did win a victory.
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:2, Insightful)
I love when someone claims that a policy doesn't work. I don't know where the synopsis gets this but from the sound of it it was never used, that's called untested, not "doesn't work."
Why is it that there seems to be two responses from these anti-Bush/anti-patriot act groups? "Terror laws don't work" where as the last full scale terror attack on our country was 5 years ago. The second response is usually "Well the world hates us" and you look again and there hasn't been an attack on US soil since 9/11. So why hasn't terrorism reigned supreme here if everyone hates us and Homeland security isn't working? We aren't fighting the three stogies here.
funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, terrorists only mean something when you choose to give them that much credit. Your giving them power by recognizing them as something they're not.
Christians, Catholics and many other "mainstream" religions have all fought holy wars that killed millions of people. This is simply a situation we are doomed to repeat because it works well for a select few. Its all about power, politics and money and absolutely nothing to do with "terror" or "fear" unless your gullable enough to actually BELIEVE THAT
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that, since the laws have never been used, they were unneeded, not untested. Furthermore, key provisions of the laws were recently struck down as unconstitutional by the Canadian courts.
So, not only were the laws not necessary, they contravened the highest law of the land. It's no wonder Parliament voted them down! I'm just surprised that the same hasn't happened yet to the blatantly unconstitutional laws that have been enacted since 9/11 south of the Canadian border!
Re:Oh Canada! (Score:3, Insightful)
It had an inherent recognition built in that the emergency is a transient state and the measures are not intended to extend beyond that. The reaction wasn't "knee-jerk" at all, it was very wisely implemented.
The attempt by the Conservatives to exploit this emergency measure in a grab for more power over the citizenry wasn't knee-jerk either.
I think the idea of all laws being required to be re-ratified on a regular basis has a great deal of appeal, personally.
They all ought to come with a specification of what societal problems they were originally intended to compensate for.
Really, the very existence of a law represents a problem in society. In an ideal system, there would be no motivation to behave in an anti-social fashion in the first place, because it would be so well designed that there wouldn't be a person in it who felt they'd be better off going it alone than participating.
Not to suggest that we're ever going to live in an ideal world, build an ideal system or get rid of laws, but it's a useful yardstick nevertheless.
"Soft on Terror" (Score:3, Insightful)
How is it that everyone not willing to give up Civil Liberties is considered "Soft on Terror"? People are cowards if they don't vote for every anti-terrorist bill? If you ask me, the people who will so readily give up their freedoms, and even send a nation's youth to war, are the real cowards.
Re:Oh Canada! (Score:1, Insightful)
Mod parent UP! (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes matters worst is Mr. Harpers response to the opposition and declaring that they don't have Canada's security in mind. Talk about spreading FUD; our PM is good at it.
I feel for anyone who lost a loved one in 9/11 but this legislation was never a solution just a stop-gap knee-jerk response.
Re:Fundamental difference (Score:3, Insightful)
The War on Drugs is also dumb as heck, I totally agree. I think your point is really about how wasteful our government is, yeah?
As for the Aspirin comment
I once made a comment.. maybe on Slashdot but I forget: if terrorists really want to piss us off, all they have to do is "leak" a "plot" to blow up an airplane using explosive undergarments. Instantly we'd all have to fly "commando" for the next couple of months. Yay for security personnel being too rubbish to do their job and instead trying to cover their asses.
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, that's an easy one. Those two positions are not contradictory at all.
Invasive, authoritarian laws like the PATRIOT Act do greatly increase the risk of terrorism (in addition to having many more deleterious effects). But terrorism is a trivial problem in the first place: something that happens with negligible frequency, and harms (on a national scale) a miniscule number of people.
So, yes, the Bush administration is actively working to destroy the Bill of Rights in order to make a trivial problem slightly worse. I do have kind of a problem with that.
Re:Article ignores politican context (Score:3, Insightful)
I ask because I keep hearing about how the US has become a police state. Well, I'm in the US and as far as I can tell, this new Bush police state looks exactly as it did under Clinton, except the economy is better. I think it is only fair that I stand with my fellow Americans and suffer as they have, but before I do that, I need to know what it is I'm missing.
You missed the memo. We are living in a near Nazish, police state that started a religious crusade only because a Republican is a president and that Democrats didn't control congress at the time. If Gore were President, the same or similiar laws would have been passed. He'd would have been declared a Nazish forcing us into a police state by all the republicans, but you wouldn't hear that on slashdot though because of our liberal bias. We'd declare a Democrat's anti-terror measures to be protective for the general citizenry similiar on how network admins need to implement policies to restrict users access to most resources for their own good.
If Gore didn't "do something" after 9/11, then he'd have been impeached since both the Democrats and Republicans would have been forced to nail him for their own political good. Of course, Gore would have "done something" to really hit the entire middle east by spending $100+ billion on sustainable non-foreign based power plants instead of the war on terror. I could easily have seen a campign "Let's not spend a penny on foreign oil!" under Gore that would have had more drastic short and long term changes for the US and the globe as the US virtually stopped buying any middle east oil. The public anger would have taken much longer to work out of our system, but we'd all be feeling like we were indirectly hurting them rather than directly hurting them.
Re:Unbiased news posts (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, blame the poster, not the editors. I don't think they changed the original post one bit, although I would like to replace("fo", "of"). Spell checkers people, if your browser doesn't have them, well, it sucks.
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:2, Insightful)
I've never been attacked by lions, I guess it's because I have this lucky anti-lion rock in my backyard.
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Makes me proud to be Canadian. (Score:3, Insightful)
Once your knee has finished jerking around, perhaps you should read a bit about what really happened.
There are plenty of laws on the books to combat crime. I don't believe for a moment that the police need to detain people for any significant length of time without charging them. If someone has committed (or is planning to commit) a crime, let the state press the appropriate charges and make the case for a conviction in a court of law.
Honestly, if the war on terror needs gulags and kangaroo courts, we deserve to lose because our values of peace, order and good government are less than worthless platitudes.
It matters not (Score:2, Insightful)
No, you're wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
1) We "all" haven't lost the "right" of Habeas Corpus. The Nov 13th 2001 Presidential Order made it legal to detain non-citizens suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism indefinitely without charges being filed against him or her, without a court hearing, and without entitlement to a legal consultant. So unless you're a non-citizen suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism, you haven't lost anything.
2) Habeas Corpus isn't a fundamental right - it's a procedural privilege. (before you respond to this point, make sure you understand what a fundamental right is, and is not, and please read a little about procedural (derived) rights, too.
3) You (or anyone else, for that matter) hasn't even names "many other" rights that we've lost. So what are they?
They don't have to! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that there seems to be two responses from these anti-Bush/anti-patriot act groups? "Terror laws don't work" where as the last full scale terror attack on our country was 5 years ago. The second response is usually "Well the world hates us" and you look again and there hasn't been an attack on US soil since 9/11. So why hasn't terrorism reigned supreme here if everyone hates us and Homeland security isn't working? We aren't fighting the three stogies here.
Well the last attack by foreign terrorists on US soil before 9/11 was in 1993, so eight years. Clearly the policies initiated after 9/11 were not necessary to provide 8 years of no attacks. Arguing that 5 years of no attacks since in any way validates those policies is the most falacious of reasoning.
And why have attacks not been more frequent? Well first there is the planning involved -- again, 8 years between the failed WTC bombing and 9/11. And more importantly, since 9/11 there has been no need to attack the US on its own soil!
Let me make this as clear as possible: Afghanistan and Iraq have caused more harm to the United States that a hundred attacks like 9/11. In response to 9/11, the U.S. did to itself more than al Qaeda could ever dream of doing just on its own capacities. Not only in material costs but in the all-important propaganda war. The credibility the US has lost in the last 5 years is a huge boon to our enemies. Our status as world leader is
It's a classic strategy, and the same one used by Hezbollah against Israel. You can't effectively attack the giant on its home turf, so you poke at it to enrage it and lure it into your home turf where the giant is at a disadvantage. In their attempts to stomp you out, the giant innevitably stomps on the innocent and thus further increases resentment of the giant. Two wins, military and PR, from one strategy.
The whole purpose of terrorism is to make your enemy crazy-stupid with fear. The U.S. is still behaving crazy-stupid, and paying for it. Why attack again? It would be a waste of resources; they are still getting everything from the one attack 5 years ago that they could hope to get from a new one. If we ever get our heads out of our asses, if we ever get people to think longer than "well no attacks it the last 5 years, so USAPATRIOT must work!", THEN maybe they'll see a need to attack us again.
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are three answers:
(1)They don't have to strike on our home territory to hurt us- in fact, they can hurt us a lot more easily, and more effectively, by attacking us abroad. If I were a fanatical Saudi Arabian suicide bomber, I could bomb a Starbucks in Topeka, but it would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to plan, and it would have a low probability of succeeding. On the other hand, I could just head to Iraq. It's a lot easier to get across the unsecured Iraqi border than through American customs, and once I'm there I look like everyone else and speak the local language, so it's much easier to operate and blend in. And the Americans have done me the favor of shipping to my front door- at the cost of billions of dollars- their young men and women. Praise Allah!
(2) They are busy attacking our allies -as they did in Madrid and London- to isolate us. And quite effectively. Notice how small the "coalition of the willing" is these days?
(3) America is pretty good at integrating its immigrants, so Al Qaeda has very few sympathizers in the United States. Muslim immigrants to the United States tend to like America, identify as Americans, and to pick up our values, and their kids are very well integrated into the culture. They may not like the government but they like the country. However, Muslims in Europe much more often end up isolated, economically disenfranchised, and pissed off at their host countries. That makes them more likely to look to radical Islam and hatch bomb plots, as in London. The way we treat our immigrants, and not the Patriot Act, is probably our strongest defense against domestic terrorism.
Re:Unbiased news posts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is we have had terrorism all along, just because it's dropped off after 9/11 doesn't mean there wasn't attacks before. And from the sound of their own recordings they'd like nothing more to strike us again on American soil. So if it is so easy to get across the borders like everyone says... what gives? Apparently Homeland security IS working at some level.
The simple answer is to claim the lions rock idea, which does make sense, but you probably don't live next door to a zoo, do you? Statistically you can predict that we should have been attacked in the last six years if we took no precaution, so that means in all likely hood the DHS works.
Allow me to make an alternate example. Assume I live in a city with another person called Joe. Joe is a murderer and a thief. I own a lot of expensive items, however I also am careful and carry a handgun on me at all time, and have a security system at home that can't be broken into. So one day after 10 years of peaceful living, I think to myself, well I've never been murdered or robbed, why don't I get rid of my gun and security system? Joe finds this out. Do you think I'm going to be safe the next day?
This doesn't mean I SHOULD have a gun and a security system, or that it's the best way to handle this. However it was effective in avoiding the problems with Joe, just as the DHS is one solution to solving terrorism.
Re:Looks to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, cause there's nothing inflammatory or trollish in this post, [slashdot.org] or this one. [slashdot.org]
(Actually, the second one is kinda funny but that's not the point).
Seriously, quit whining Mr. Coward. There are good mods and bad mods, just like there are good posts and bad posts. Put away your conspiracy theories, dazzle us with your insightful commentary and let the meta-mods do their job.
Re:Article ignores politican context (Score:2, Insightful)
At least you are consistent in your beliefs, just don't start pretending you put any value on personal freedom.
Re:They don't have to! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they turned us into the frightened hateful warmongers that all their propaganda said we were. Again, the reason they don't have to attack us again is because we gave them exactly what they wanted.
As for no need to attack the US directly since we have made it so easy to attack us abroad, isn't that a good thing? Keep the battle off our soil?
Uh, I wouldn't call one one attack every eight years a "battle". This is exactly the kind of crazy-stupid illogical thinking that led us to attack Iraq as part of the War on Terror. What, you think that if we didn't invade Iraq, that we'd be facing exactly the same degree of warfare over here? Are you really that crazy-stupid?
We have created a net increase in the amount of battle going on in the world. Some would consider that a bad thing. If the tradeoff was attacks in the U.S. that killed between 6 and 3,000 people every 8 years (average: 375/yr) then I'd say that was a good idea.
The analogy that we are the giant lured from our own land is totally rediculous.
That's a weird way to spell "apt". But hey, let's just keep getting beat up in Iraq, a land we don't understand and can't blend into so we're constantly harrassed by insurgents, losing people, money, and influence every day. It isn't an analogy, it's a strategy, and it's working perfectly for our enemies.
As for killing innocents, that is only a rule that the US and Israel must follow, or apologize to hell for should someone "innocent" die. Terrorists kill innocents the majority of the time. They TARGET innocents.
WRONG! It is not a rule the US must follow, it is a REALITY that the US thinks it can absolve itself from. Everyone knows that when you kill innocents, the survivors will hate you. Al Qaeda knows they're fucking hated by every Shia (and many Sunni) in Iraq, but they don't care. Pratical countries like Israel or Russia just deal with the fact. The U.S. is the only one who thinks that the survivors should love us even though we killed innocents, because we're the good guys! The U.S. is the one who thought that the people of Iraq would thank us for bombing them! It's insane.
You really want to prove how morally superior the U.S. is? Do you believe that we are? Well I do to, but the only thing that can possibly show this is actions. So how about this: When terrorists kill innocents, we don't kill any innocents in return. I know it sounds crazy -- what, don't lash out randomly in a blind rage when someone hurts you? -- but I think it would work.
But that's ok, cause if we stick our heads in the sand maybe it won't be us that gets attacked. Unfortunately for you, it was us.
You aren't paying attention. If you follow what I'm saying, I'm saying that if we ignored the terrorists, if we stopped invading Arab nations in the name of terror, then we WOULD be attacked again. If we stopped giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted in response to 9/11, then it would be worth their while to attempt to do it again and get the crazy-stupid behavior that we've been showing for the last 5 years.
So when that happens, you have to ask yourself: Are you going to give the terrorists what they want? Are you going to dance to their tune? Are you going to become, once again, that which they say you are?
And the blame for all our actions, right or wrong, is the fault of the terrorists.
Well, you could certainly call the invasion of Iraq an effect of the terrorists' actions, for sure. Yet I don't think you're going to win any hearts and minds in Sadr City by telling them that soldiers are shooting at them because of Osama bin Laden.
Post-disaster legislation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow policies that dont work get revoked. (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't work? Was there a terrorist act in Canada that the laws failed to prevent?
Re:No, you're wrong. (Score:1, Insightful)
Again, are you sure he's the only one whose rights were violated ?
No. Are you sure that this started with the war on terror? Are you absolutely sure that the kids you see on milk cartons are not kidnapped for IRS experiments?
How could you be sure, if our judicial system is no longer transparent
What makes you think the judicial system was EVER transparent?
Do you simply trust the government and 'intelligence data' it receives ?
Not since I've put on this shiny hat of yours
They are the same people who either lied about Iraq WMDs or were actually dumb enough to believe in those WMDs - either way they were dead wrong based on 'classified intelligence'.
OK, let me pull the hat off.
Since the director of the CIA risked his career on telling the Prez that WMD's in Iraq was a slam dunk, I'd say that they really believed it, which would eliminate the liar angle I hear over and over and over and over again. Since we all know that the Prez and CIA director Tenet sincerely believed that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD's, that kinda makes those that call Bush a liar liars themselves, doesn't it. (I stress stockpiles because we did find WMD's there. But the press ignored it because it wasn't giant warehouses full). As to the being dumb enough to believe in those WMDs, unfortunately, that goes for the world's intelligence services as well.
The kicker for me, however, was that Bush received a message from Putin saying that Russian intelligence had intel that Iraq was planning to attack the US. Now, less than two years after 9-11, the President is told a sworn enemy of your country that tried to kill a former president, is known (albeit incorrectly) to posses chemical and biological weapons and is not afraid to use them on civilians, is planning to attack your country, do you REALLY want a president that will sit back and do nothing? Do you want a president that will NOT unleash the most powerful military in the world to defend its citizens? Not me.
But if that's the kind of president Americans want, and it looks like the press has done its damnedest to see that through, then the citizens deserve whatever they get.