The 2022 Canadian parliamentary session has been marked by a strong trend toward authoritarian policy measures. From the most extreme example with the invocation of the Emergencies Act, to bills C-11 and C-18 seeking to control the media and internet, to the freezing of handgun sales in Canada, the federal government is heavily focused on policies of control.
Individual liberties are being set aside as policies focus on ostensibly pursuing collective safety through increased reach into our lives. Cumulatively, Canadians have seen more individual freedoms lost in the last six months than in the last 10 years, and this trend shows no sign of declining.
Most government bills are introduced in the House of Commons. I suspect S-7 was introduced in the Senate in the hope that it would quietly pass with little public notice. The bill would still have to go through the House, but it could potentially be slipped through quickly if most of the debate and committee work had been done in the Senate first.
While S-7 sounds like a sleepy legislative housekeeping bill on the surface, it contains measures that would lead to terrible breaches of privacy for travelling Canadians.
If S-7 is enshrined into law, a Canadian customs officer could demand to search a traveller’s digital device based on “reasonable general concern” that the Customs Act may be breached. It’s hard to imagine a more arbitrary bar to set to carry out an action as intrusive as a deep dive into a citizen’s personal digital device.
What would constitute a reasonable general concern? A passenger with shifty eyes? A nervous demeanor? Sweating?
Maybe the customs officer will simply claim their personal intuition was set off.
To be fair, customs agents have to constantly examine travellers and try to spot signs that a traveller may be trying to smuggle something or is illegally on the move. Customs agents have the need and the ability to compel searches of people crossing the border. Because of the intrusive nature of this authority though, it needs to be tightly regulated—not left to a definition as broad as “reasonable general concern.”
People keep a massive amount of personal information on their phones these days and it is more than simply an inconvenience when somebody else accesses that information. Everything from family pictures to personal correspondence to sensitive business and financial information could be contained on a phone, and it isn’t unreasonable for a person to oppose having a stranger access that data, even if it is a customs agent.
Phones and laptops could indeed contain data legitimately of interest to customs agents. What if there is child porn or records of illicit transactions on the device, for example? That said, any person on the street could have that sort of illicit data on their phones once in the country. Should police be able to compel access to the information simply based on their feeling of a “reasonable general concern?” It may come to that if we set this precedent with customs agents.
I don’t think the Trudeau government expected their appointed senators to speak up on S-7. Instead of quietly passing through the chamber, the bill has raised heated debate. Sen. David Richards compared it to police tactics in fascist Spain, while Sen. Mobina Jaffer expressed concern the bill would lead to racial profiling at the border. Now that S-7 has garnered such negative attention, I suspect it will be amended or possibly even scrapped. Credit must be given where due to those Liberal-appointed senators for speaking up based on their conscience rather than party allegiances.
Whether S-7 passes or not, we must bear in mind that this is just the latest in the string of government efforts to erode personal liberties. While we are dealing with supply chain issues, economic challenges due to inflation, are in an energy crisis, and while war wracks Ukraine and Russia we have a federal government insistent on dedicating its energy and political capital toward centralizing power for itself.
What is driving this ideological push to keep eroding individual rights? Did the anti-mandate protests earlier this year instill a sense of insecurity among decision-makers, thus making them feel compelled to control citizens? Are there plans for radical policies in the future, and the government wants to ensure it could quell organized citizens’ opposition if it came about?
Something has changed in Canada’s government this year, and not for the better. Bills such as S-7 are symptoms of a larger malaise within the state. Authoritarianism is becoming entrenched, and the most frightening thing of all is the docile manner in which Canadians are accepting it.
