Watch: Conservative Sen. Daniel Lang says his Senate committee has found radicalization is happening in many arenas, not only online.
OTTAWA – Among the many concerns surrounding the Conservatives’ proposed anti-terror laws is they down’t address homegrown terrorism — a phenomenon to which Canadians were chillingly close last October.
But it’s not like Parliament isn’t doing anything to address the real threat of homegrown terrorism — a Senate committee has been studying the matter for four months. It’s just that the relatively sluggish manner in which the Senate is proceeding with the matter lies in stark contrast to the lightning-fast speed at which the proposed laws are moving through Parliament.
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The Senate committee has been studying the issue since October with the goal of producing a report by June — at which point the Senate will pass the report to the House of Commons. The House will have several months to look it over and decide whether to comment on it before passing it back to the Upper Chamber.
Conservative Sen. Daniel Lang, who chairs the committee studying the the threat of homegrown radicalization, defended the speed at which the study is proceeding.
“It’s not a simple issue to deal with,” he said in an interview on The West Block with Tom Clark, pointing out the Senate is trying to get to the bottom of the “who,” “where” and “how” of the matter.
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Even though the committee meets only once a week, Lang said, they have already made some discoveries.
“One of the most important findings that we have found out so far is the fact that the radicalization does not just take place on the internet … It has been overwhelmingly brought before our committee that the radicalization begins from human interaction.”
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There is a clear dichotomy, however, between what’s happening in that committee room and what’s happening down the hall in the House of Commons, where the Conservatives imposed time limits on debating and analyzing Bill C-51, their proposed anti-terror law.
The bill proposes giving more powers to the national security agencies — allowing CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, to hold suspicious people in detention for up to seven days without charge and stopping potential criminals from getting on an airplane, for example.
Critics of the bill include former prime ministers and former Supreme Court justices, who say the bill is so poorly written it could give security agencies power to apply the rules intended for terrorists to a person protesting a pipeline or someone staging a wildcat strike.
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Still, the Conservatives say their proposed legislation is such a no-brainer, they have moved to have it pass through Parliament in mere days.
The Liberals have said they will vote in favour of the bill now, then fight to change it later on; two aspects missing, they say, is a mechanism for mandatory review of the laws down the road as well as “sunset clauses” that would phase out the law over time.
“We asked for a mandatory statutory review,” Liberal public safety critic, and former solicitor general, Wayne Easter said, adding his party did exactly that when they passed the last anti-terror laws while in power in 2001.
“It looks at the good and the bad and the ugly, and changes what is necessary based on experience.”
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