CCLA Logo
CCLA News Links
For Thursday, March 13th, 2014
In Today's News:
* Ottawa imposes life-long gag order on bureaucrats, lawyers
* Transgender Ontarians avoiding ERs for fear of discrimination: survey
* Toronto police board to unveil draft carding policy on Thursday
* European union takes steps toward protecting data
* CCLET's Danielle McLaughlin: Helping kids turn othering into a critical discussion
* Il y a 50 ans, l'id�e d'une charte qu�b�coise des droits naissait
Toronto Star: Ottawa has slapped a life-long gag order on bureaucrats and lawyers working in a number of government agencies dealing with sensitive national security information.

The changes enacted Wednesday, and published in the Canada Gazette, reveal employees in 12 government divisions - five of which have been disbanded - are now subject to provisions under the Security of Information Act that permanently binds them to secrecy. Those employees, mostly Department of Justice lawyers and senior bureaucrats at the Privy Council Office, could face as much as 14 years in prison for disclosing "special operational information" without authorization.

But while the government maintains the secrecy is necessary to maintain Canada's most "operationally sensitive" information, critics say it's designed to discourage whistleblowing and hamper the public debate now swirling around modern state espionage.

"The practical implication of this is that it puts a terrific chill on the possibility of drawing on practitioner expertise, particularly the retired practitioners, to contribute to any kind of debate on intelligence and security matters in Canada if people followed the letter of the law," said Wesley Wark, a University of Ottawa professor and one of Canada's leading experts in national security and intelligence issues.
Ottawa Citizen: Transgender Ontarians are avoiding provincial hospitals - often at personal risk - because of the mixed reactions they receive from medical staff, a new study says.

The University of Western Ontario's provincewide, community-based Trans PULSE study found that more than half of trans individuals have had negative experiences in emergency departments, where they face inappropriate questions, derogatory language and are even occasionally refused service.

Prof. Greta Bauer, who worked with many others on the study, said she was shocked to find that 21 per cent of respondents had avoided seeking emergency care in the past over these fears of negative reactions. "The idea of feeling safer outside of the emergency room in a potential medical crisis really speaks to the level of fear (trans) people have going into these settings, on how they're going to be treated," says Bauer.

Toronto Star: The public will get its first glimpse of a draft policy on police carding at a board meeting Thursday. Lawyer Frank Addario, who was hired to create the policy by the Toronto Police Services Board in December, will present the draft and describe the general principles behind the document, as well as the months of work that went into the process.

But the first-ever policy on the controversial police practice is not finalized and will be the subject of a full public airing at a special board meeting on April 8.

Police board chair Alok Mukherjee said complaints from an outside lawyer that the board should have released the document in advance of the meeting were unfounded. "At the end, it's a policy not for lawyers. It's a policy to keep the community safe," said a frustrated Mukherjee, who added that work on the document will most likely continue right until the meeting. [...]

Mukherjee says Addario conducted research, spoke to legal experts and community members, as well as social scientists, and met several times with the board. Police Chief Bill Blair and the Toronto Police Association have also read the two-page document, which contains an evaluation component to gauge the effectiveness of the policy once it's in place.

New York Times: The European Parliament passed a strong new set of data protection measures on Wednesday prompted in part by the disclosure of America's vast electronic spying program. But the prospects for the provisions to become law will depend on the 28 European Union member governments giving their accord, which is highly uncertain. And the current Parliament will disband for elections in May, meaning the package will have to be picked up and carried forward by a new set of lawmakers who may or may not be as concerned about digital privacy as the current body.

The measures, meant to protect the European Union's 250 million Internet users from online surveillance, approved by a wide margin by lawmakers meeting in Strasbourg, France, had been under discussion since 2012. But they received impetus last year by revelations from Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor at the United States National Security Agency, about the spying programs carried out by the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, including in Europe.

The new rules, among the most stringent data protections that lawmakers anywhere have pursued, aim to give people more say about who gets access to their personal data and would increase safeguards on the data that ends up with the police and judicial authorities. They would also grant individuals the right to have their online data erased - the so-called "right to be forgotten."
Huffington Post: Some of us are getting a little tired of the "What are you?" question. Many of us have learned enough about the world and have simply developed good enough manners to know that people come in many shapes, sizes, colours, and backgrounds and could be offended if quizzed about themselves in this fashion. But not all of us have taken this in.

I recall many years ago that when a young woman was introduced, the first question asked would be along the lines of "What does your father do?" The implication was, of course, that one could learn whether a woman was respectable or worth knowing by the answer to this question. Women were not worth knowing in their own right. Happily, I have not heard this asked for a few decades.

Still, people of colour can expect to be asked "Where are you from?" The implication is that everyone who is not white must have emigrated from somewhere else. Somehow, knowing the answer to this question is meant not only to satisfy curiosity, but also to be valuable when deciding whether the respondent comes from a "respectable," "exotic," or "dangerous" origin.

An African-Canadian woman I know became very tired of being asked which "island" she came from. Her family had lived in Canada for many, many generations, so her answer to this question was "Toronto Island."
Le Devoir: Il y a 50 ans, Jacques-Yvan Morin, alors professeur � la Facult� de droit de l'Universit� de Montr�al, signait un texte remarquable publi� dans la Revue de droit de McGill, dans lequel il proposait l'adoption d'une �Charte des droits l'homme pour le Qu�bec�.

Soucieux de r�pondre � l'imp�rieux besoin de changement qui caract�risait la R�volution tranquille, Jacques-Yvan Morin tenait alors des propos qui sont aujourd'hui d'une �tonnante actualit� : �[D]ans une soci�t� o� la majorit� affirme son existence en tant que groupe national au moment m�me o� se manifeste un certain pluralisme dans la structure ethnique et religieuse de la population, l'�tat provincial doit se donner pour mission d'assurer la coexistence pacifique des groupes et des croyances. [...] La loi doit assurer les libert�s politiques de tout citoyen, quelque impopulaires que soient ses id�es, au besoin m�me contre la majorit� de la population.�

Situant son projet dans un contexte international et �voquant le �mouvement irr�versible, dict� par l'int�gration �conomique et politique acc�l�r�e qui s'accomplit sous nos yeux�, il rappelait qu'apr�s avoir adopt� la D�claration universelle des droits de l'homme en 1948, les Nations unies examinaient des projets de Pactes des droits de l'homme, le premier portant sur les droits civils et politiques, le second sur les droits �conomiques, sociaux et culturels. Il s'int�ressait aussi � la Convention europ�enne des droits de l'homme qu'avait d�j� adopt�e le Conseil de l'Europe, et mettait l'accent sur la cr�ation d'une Commission et d'une Cour europ�enne des droits de l'homme.
"The freedom of no one is safe unless the freedom of everyone is safe."
www.ccla.org
KEY LINKS

Become a member

Donate to CCLA

 Donate to CCLET

Follow us on Twitter
RightsWatch logo
A blog monitoring rights & freedoms across Canada
TVO Parents.com & CCLET team up to present "Civics for Kids".