OTTAWA – Wearing a mask while breaking the law could now land you in double trouble if a private members bill introduced in parliament Thursday passes.
The House of Commons debated the bill, introduced by Conservative Alberta MP Blake Richards, that would see it become a crime to wear a mask while taking part in a riot or an unlawful assembly.
In doing so, it increases the penalty for masked riot participants, making it an offence carrying a maximum five-year prison term.
The problem: the law is redundant, according to a Toronto civil liberties lawyer.
“It looks like this member totally misunderstood exactly what he was doing,” said Adam Goodman. “Essentially what this bill is doing is making it illegal to wear a disguise while doing something that is already illegal.”
Riots and unlawful assemblies are both illegal under the Criminal Code, so is wearing a disguise while committing an indictable offence, such as a riot. Unlawful assemblies are summary convictions.
That means people participating in a riot or unlawful assembly can already be arrested and charged, whether they are wearing a mask or not.
The bill comes after a rash of violent outbursts that saw people don masks to commit crimes. Masked members of the so-called Black Bloc mixed in with protestors at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver and the G20 in Toronto last summer.
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Vancouver’s streets erupted in violence after the Stanley Cup final in June, with many people covering their faces while setting cars alight or looting stores. Vancouver Police have had challenges identifying the people who committed the crimes and thus recommending charges.
Blake Richards said this is the problem his bill seeks to solve, mostly by deterring it in the first place.
“Hopefully we can see these types of situations avoided completely,” Richards said. “No one wants to see legitimate protests stopped from happening, but what we want to do is see it not escalate into the situations we’ve seen in Vancouver and Toronto.”
The logic is keeping masks out of the equation will help stop things from degenerating.
Richards added that he hopes the bill will give police officers the power to move in before a situation deteriorates into violence.
“When they see individuals who are masking things up and intent in starting to engage in those types of activities, it allows (police) to make those kinds of arrests pre-emptively, so they can stop the violent behavior, the property damage, the assaults on individuals,” he said.
Goodman warns that’s where the bill runs the risk of blurring legal limits.
The way the law is currently penned, the police can’t arrest masked people until the situation is determined to be a riot or an unlawful assembly, meaning its pre-emptive power is limited.
Situations have to meet very specific criteria to be considered a riot or unlawful assembly. An insurrection is only a riot, if the relevant authority reads a literal “riot act.”
The definition of an unlawful assembly is more vague, but it requires three or more people to gather in a common purpose in a way that causes other people to fear on reasonable grounds they will disturb the peace or provoke others to do so.
Goodman fears that because of the complexity, the law will be misunderstood.
“That’s my fear more than anything that if people are participating in a protest police will go picking off everyone with their faces covered,” he said.
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