Parliament strikes again!

Recently MP Vick Toews has been vigorously pushing a piece of legislation in parliament that would give law enforcement the power to request private information from ISPs about it's customers internet habits. It would give police the ability to go to an ISP and request the information for a specific person, that information would include ip addresses, browsing habits etc. In a nutshell, the police would be able to look at an individuals information and be able to see what websites they've visited, what files they've downloaded and perhaps even read that persons emails. The idea is to make it easier to investigate serious criminal offenses such as child pornography and terrorism.

While extreme, I can see the benefit something like this would have. It could make it much easier to investigate, convict or stop child predators. It would provide a wealth of intelligence on suspected terrorists. There are a lot of situations where this type of information could justifiably be used by law enforcement. Here's the thing though; they can already do that.

The only significant difference this bill would make, is that law enforcement would now be free to gain access to that information without a warrant. The court wouldn't be involved at any point prior to an actual charge being laid.

I don't think I can properly underscore how serious a violation of Canadian rights this is. It is literally the same thing as the police coming to your home while you're at work and rifling through your possessions without a warrant. They show up, the landlord lets them in, and they're free to look at everything in your home.

The reaction from opposition was predictable, they questioned the privacy concerns, and the obvious breach of Canadian rights in a session of parliament. Mr. Toews, not content to simply say it was needed, accused the opposition of "standing with the child predators". Forget the outright disgust of using such an accusation at all, he did so in the house of commons. The most sacred room in Canadian government. He accused a member of parliament of supporting child predators because he rose an objection to the violation of our rights as Citizens of this country.

Mr. Toews should resign. It's as simple as that. But wait! He's not done yet. Canadians weren't very happy with the proposition of any police officer who felt like it, going to an ISP and getting a list of all the twisted and perverted porn they've been watching lately (you really don't want to know..) so they started a Twitter campaign. Sending the most mundane tweets about their daily lives with the hashtag  #TellVicEverything. The reasoning is that he wants our personal privacy rights to be abolished, so we might as well just tell him everything up front.


Toews recently did an interview in which he stated that he wasn't aware of the section in the bill that would allow for ANY police officer to make this request for information. 


Link to the interview here

So this tells us that one of two things has happened:

1. A member of parliament vigorously pushed and defended a bill that would abolish a large portion of Canadian citizens' right to privacy, and remove judicial oversight in law enforcement investigations. He defended the bill so vigorously as to essentially accuse another MP of being a child pornographer. He did all of this WITHOUT READING THE DAMN BILL!

or:

2. A member of parliament vigorously pushed and defended a bill that he KNEW would abolish Canadian privacy rights and remove judicial oversight from police investigations and now he's backpedaling and trying to deny the whole thing by saying "he wasn't aware".

These are quite literally the only two possible outcomes. Either he was completely and totally incompetent in a situation where such incompetence can curtail the rights of Canadian citizens, or he was complicit in attempting to curtail those rights.

Either option is far beyond disgusting. The mans behavior in parliament alone should have him out on his backside. Add to that the utter incompetence, or the complicity with regards to severely damaging the rights of Canadian citizens (not sure which one it is yet, evil or stupid?) and Vic Toews should be submitting his resignation.

He doesn't deserve to cast his eyes on the house of commons, to say nothing of participating in it.

Mr. Toews, I've been a life long Conservative voter. The NDP, Liberals and Green Party should be pretty pleased with you, because I, like many other life long Conservatives have now become an undecided voter.

Thanks for that.

A little random meandering

I'm not entirely sure what's been up with me lately. I haven't been sleeping right, I'm cranky (well crankier) at work and have a lot less ambition to DO my work. I haven't been putting in any overtime hours so I don't think I'm burned out. When I do sleep I can't seem to get myself awake for hours after I get out of bed. I think perhaps I've been drinking too much lately, but even that I've cut out recently with little change. Meh, maybe it's just February.. Yeah, we'll blame it on February. It's like one giant string of Mondays all in a row.

I know this barely counts as a blog entry, but hell, there's maybe 3 people reading this on a regular basis and I'm one of em, so I'm not gonna worry about it.

Meh.