EVERYONE needs a good editor.
If you’re in the writing trade, you’ll probably discover this is a wise rule to live by. Whether you’re turning out novels, news reports, editorials or opinion articles, it’s a rare piece that’s beyond improvement. And no one’s work is too good to run by someone else’s trained eye and critical judgment.
If you’re in the government trade, you also need something like the editor rule. Governments aren’t infallible, even when they’ve just been elected with a majority. Police can make mistakes, even when they’re trying to do good things like shutting down child pornography. That’s why we have important institutional editing tools — Parliament to look for flaws in legislation, the courts to supervise police intrusion on the privacy of citizens — to act as a check on misguided authority.
The Harper government’s mishandling of a bill that expands the ability of police to monitor online and mobile activity shows how important it is to have these checks when authorities act as if they’re beyond criticism.
Bill C-30 requires close scrutiny because of understandable concerns in two areas. Will it unduly increase the cost of services by making providers adopt new monitoring and storage capacity? Does it intrude too much on privacy by allowing police to demand basic customer information (name, address, phone number, email and Internet protocol address) without a warrant? Police would still need a warrant to examine an actual record of online activity.
These issues need serious examination. But Public Safety Minister Vic Toews wrong-footed discussion by absurdly suggesting the goal of stopping child pornography put the bill beyond criticism. "He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers," he railed at a Liberal critic on Monday, a cheap shot that backfired when Conservative MPs joined privacy commissioners and other critics in calling for amendments to make C-30 less intrusive. By Wednesday, Mr. Toews was sending the bill to committee for rescue editing and House Leader Peter Van Loan said the government was "open to a broad range of amendments."
The government needed to be taught this lesson that a majority is not infallibility.
But with C-30 up for serious scrutiny, let’s clean up the debate. Mr. Toews is now the target of an intrusive social media outing of purported details of his divorce. That muck-hole is not where a responsible discussion of policing and privacy needs to go.
