Canadians received a shock to the system the first week of November 2016, when a spate of news items revealed how police and spy agencies flout the law and moral conventions to spy on citizens and journalists, in some cases dating back for many years.
The biggest blow to Canada’s often rosy image came on Nov. 3, when a federal court ruling revealed that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service — the CSIS — has been operating a secret metadata collection program since 2006, and retained citizens’ identifying information illegally.
The question on every Canadian’s mind now is — how, in our supposedly sleepy liberal democracy, did this happen?
In establishing the domestic spy agency with the CSIS Act, legislators largely left it up to CSIS itself to decide how the law should be interpreted. “It appears that CSIS got their own legal advice that gave them the most favorable spin or interpretation of the law that one could possibly take,” privacy lawyer David Fraser said in an interview. “Really, stretching it almost to the breaking point.”
