“In the context of ever-increasing police budgets and weak oversight agencies, the public should be very alarmed about the further erosion of our civil liberties and human rights through the passage of C-70,” warns Meghan McDermott, policy director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA).
“The rapid enactment of these new laws without any kind of scrutiny is devastating for social movements in BC and across Canada,” she said in an exclusive interview last week.
The Countering Foreign Interference Act (Bill C-70) received royal assent on June 20 after being rushed through the House of Commons and then stampeded through the Senate in three days. Now that it is the law of the land, the government must bring down specific regulations and appoint a Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner.
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The Canadian Bar Association (CBA)’s Criminal Justice Section advised the Senate that equating “a foreign entity” with a terrorist group when there was “nothing inherently criminal about a foreign entity” raised concerns about the “potentially overbroad and vague nature of the new criminal offences created in Bill C-70.”
“This is particularly worrisome given the potential life sentences that attach to these offences and the statutory bar against multiple sentences running concurrently,” stated Kyla Lee in the CBA’s submission to the senate.
