Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:28 — 54.5MB) | Embed
That Stephen Harper’s government wished to create a new order in Canada was clear from its earliest days, and from foreign policy and immigration, to environmental and labour policies, the country has changed. Now though, with the introduction of Bills C-51 and C-44, the prime minister is making much better his famous boast to make of this once familiar liberal democracy something “unrecognizable.”
Just what the transformation could mean for Canadian life, should the Anti-Terrorism Act pass final reading and be enacted, has mobilized resistance across the country, uniting political polar opposites, even while making strange bedfellows of the Liberal and Conservative parties.
Carmen Cheung is Senior Counsel at the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, where she focuses on issues relating to national security and litigation matters for the Association. She’s recently back from a leave, serving as acting Director of the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, where she also taught international human rights advocacy and the law of armed conflict.
Carmen Cheung in the first half.
And; it’s not just in Canada, Western Civilization as a whole is suffering a crisis of confidence. Where we once sang of our bravery and strength, today’s rewritten national anthems could well mewl, beg, and plead for mercy and protection. It seems there’s nothing for it now but to surrender our freedoms, the precious way of life George W. Bush so busily beavered to protect from the “evil-doers”, and allow democracy die for fear it may be murdered. That is, if you believe what the government and their cohorts in captured media incessantly tell you.
Scott Horton is a practicing emerging markets lawyer, lecturer at Columbia Law School, National Magazine Award-winning columnist for his reporting on the law and national security issues, contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, and author of the freshly-released book, ‘Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare.’ A life-long human rights activist, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, and other activists caught in the former Soviet Union’s legal system.
Scott Horton and the Free World enmeshed in the Emergency-Secrecy Cycle in the second half.
And; Victoria Street News publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of some what’s good to do in and around our town in the coming week, and beyond that too. But first, Carmen Cheung and Canada’s C-51: A terrorism bill too far?