Note: For this episode of Hannaford, Western Standard News Editor Dave Naylor and Reporter Leah Mushet join me to talk about what 9/11 means to Canadians today.Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four American airliners. Two were flown into the World Trade Center. One struck the Pentagon. Passengers and crew on the fourth forced it down in a Pennsylvania field before it could reach Washington. Almost 3,000 people were murdered.All of this went down in history as 9/11.That is the event we commemorate, tomorrow..Osama bin Laden’s network planned it as a mass-casualty jihad against the United States, an act of war by a terrorist organization that had attacked U.S. targets before, and wanted a spectacle large enough to change American policy.It did. Governments on both sides of the border took our grief as a warrant for a stronger and more intrusive state..Border queues, airport scanners, and the standing assumption that intelligence services should find plotters before they kill were not the old normal. But, after 9/11 they were business as usual. Nor was the trade-off imaginary: North America has seen deadly attacks since the new laws were implemented, just nothing on that scale.As in the US, so there were new anti-terrorist measures in Canada. And they were put to good use.CSIS used them against the so-called Toronto 18 group, that in 2006 was discovered plotting to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange and later to storm the House of Commons and murder politicians. Their apprehension was a Canadian example of successful prevention, for which ordinary criminal law, used after the fact, would have been too late to do any good.A success then. But sadly the lesson governments on both sides of the border took from that, was that every power taken in the first frightened weeks of a national crisis should stay, migrate, and attach to new targets as politicians thought advisable..The American sequence is familiar: the Patriot Act, bulk telephony metadata, and FISA Section 702. Those tools can stop bombs. But, they can also be turned inward. And were. A foreign-intelligence architecture was used in an investigation that touched a presidential campaign. FISA process, unmasking, and an informant in a campaign’s orbit are not folklore; they are the matters of public record that conservatives have spent a decade arguing, and the warning is simple. A machine built for foreign enemies will, if unsupervised, find a home in domestic politics.Happily, Canada did not copy the entire American model..But it built its own.The 2001 Anti-terrorism Act created terrorism-specific offences, financing crimes, and asset-freezing tools beyond ordinary murder and conspiracy. Later, Bill C-51 let CSIS move from watch-and-report to threat-reduction measures. CSIS warrants still go to the Federal Court, but are usually dealt with in secret.In 2022 that national-security vocabulary was applied to a civil protest. We know it as 'The Convoy' and civil it was, in both senses of the word. The challenge for Cabinet was that in order to declare a public-order emergency, it had to find a “threat to the security of Canada” in the CSIS Act sense of the words – espionage, sabotage, foreign influence, terrorism, or violent subversion – because the same statute excludes lawful advocacy, protest and dissent. The Emergency Economic Measures Order then authorized banks to freeze accounts of people linked to the protest without a court order: the shape of a sanctions tool, used on a political occupation.In due course, the Emergencies Act – formerly the War Measures Act – was invoked.The Federal Court of Appeal has since held that invocation unreasonable and ultra vires – beyond what the law allows – and found Charter breaches of expression and unreasonable search. The government has taken the case to the Supreme Court. Until that Court speaks, two levels of court have said the statutory threshold was not met. The freeze was temporary. The precedent is set.That is the Canadian warning. You may not need a spy in a campaign office. You may need only a proclamation, a list of account numbers.Meanwhile, over the last five years, new statutes that keep parts of the exceptional architecture have been passed into law.Bill C-8 for example, lets the industry minister order telecom providers to take steps to secure the system against specified threats, including — in defined circumstances — prohibiting or suspending service to a named person. That is an executive cut-off power over connectivity, with limited prior judicial control.Bill C-22, passed by the Commons and now before the Senate, is lawful-access reform: warrantless yes-or-no “confirmation of service,” coupled with powers to require specified service providers to retain categories of your metadata for up to six monthsBill C-34, not yet law, would create a digital safety regime for social-media and chatbot services and a new Digital Safety Commission with enormous powers. Harmful-content categories and age-gating are the stated purpose. Broad regulation of platforms is the effect.None of these is “the Patriot Act.” But together they move the state closer to seeing, tracing, interrupting and conditioning us to accept government oversight of our digital life..It is the legacy of 9/11, that we have been forced to spend our moral authority.Liberal democracies used to tell other countries: we hunt terrorists but we do not treat dissent as a security file; we do not freeze a citizen’s bank account. We do not prepare dossiers on our political opponents.We welcomed visitors to our country with a smile.Terrorist actions cost us all that simple civility.The rule that should have survived the second week of September 2001 is therefore still simple and obvious.A power may be necessary to fight terrorism. But it needs a sunset clause. America's has one. The FISA power lapsed a few weeks ago... (Although collection continues under the FISA Court’s certification into 2027.) Once Canada's are on the books, there they stay.“This changed everything” is not a legal test. In Canada at least, the Charter is.Nine-eleven changed what we fear. It did not repeal what a free country has been allowed to become.
