by Janice Tibbetts
Source: The Ottawa citizen
URL: [link]
Date: September 22, 2009


OTTAWA — Canada's most senior judge cautioned Tuesday against going overboard in the fight against terrorism by putting too much emphasis on the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. at the expense of sacrificing civil rights and charter protections.

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin's warning that lawmakers, judges and citizens must heed the big picture comes as the federal government's war on terror is taking a beating in the nation's courts.

"The fear and anger that terrorism produces may cause leaders to make war on targets that may or may not be connected with the terrorist incident," McLachlin told the Ottawa Women's Canadian Club in a luncheon speech Tuesday.

"Or perhaps it may lead governments to curtail civil liberties and seek recourse in tactics they might otherwise deplore . . . that may not, in the clearer light of retrospect, be necessary or defensible."

The chief justice, citing historic examples of terrorism over the decades, described it as "an ongoing phenomenon that neither started nor ended with 9/11" and therefore must be dealt with in a broad, systemic and sustainable way."It's not a do it once and it's over situation," McLachlin said of short-term efforts to crack down.

Nor is it an "either-or" situation in which society must choose between rights or terrorism, she said.

The challenge in putting civil liberties on equal footing is that terrorist acts themselves breed fear that "there is a terrorist around every corner" who must be caught at all costs, she said.

McLachlin delivered her comments in a week that federal counter-terrorism measures are in peril.

Only hours before her speech, Mohamed Harkat held a news conference a few blocks away to bask in his new freedom after a judge relaxed strict bail conditions that confined him to virtual house arrest since his release from detention three years ago.

The Algerian-born Harkat, whom the government accuses of being an al-Qaida sleeper agent, is one of five non-Canadian terror suspects subject to contentious security certificates — one of the key elements of the federal anti-terrorism campaign.

The regime allows the government to hold a person in "administrative detention," without charges, until a judge decides in closed-hearings whether the suspect should be deported as a threat to national security.

The five suspects have been released in recent years, but they are all subject to strict conditions and surveillance.

A recent Federal Court ruling in Harkat's case cast a pall on the credibility of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, accusing the agency of suppressing information about a dubious informant.

In Montreal, the security certificate case against suspect Adil Charkaoui is on the verge of collapse amid admissions that the federal government does not have a strong enough case against him.

McLachlin's court — the Supreme Court of Canada — has had its hand in adjudicating terrorism laws, ruling almost three years ago that security certificates were unconstitutional. The court ordered Ottawa to rewrite its legislation so that suspects could have advocates present in closed hearings to be privy to secret intelligence evidence.

The Supreme Court has also lambasted CSIS for destroying files it kept on Charkaoui and the bench sided last year with Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, ruling that he had the right to Canadian intelligence information collected against him during interviews at the U.S. military unit in Cuba.

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