Don't give Mounties free rein, probe told

Ottawa: Canadians should be wary of giving too free a rein to police in the name of fighting terrorism, says the former head of the country's spy agency.
Reid Morden told the Air India inquiry yesterday that he's against any attempt to water down the legal test the RCMP must pass to obtain wiretaps or otherwise conduct surveillance of citizens.
He acknowledged his former agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has the power to eavesdrop and keep tabs on people based on mere suspicion – rather than hard evidence – they may be a threat to national security. But Morden argued it would have "tremendous societal implications" to let the Mounties do the same.
"I really do believe it is too high a price to pay to change the threshold for the police to investigate."
John Major, the former Supreme Court of Canada judge who heads the inquiry, appeared more willing to consider the idea of broadened police powers in anti-terror cases.
"You wouldn't apply it to other criminal activities, because the perception is those other activities do not threaten the nation as a whole," said Major. "But terrorist activities have the effect of potentially destroying countries, civilizations."
Morden expressed fear, however, that if police won an exception for anti-terror investigations they wouldn't want to stop there.
RCMP-CSIS turf wars have been a central theme at the inquiry, which is belatedly examining the 1985 downing of Air India Flight 182 by a terrorist bomb that took 329 lives.
A chief Mountie complaint was that CSIS erased hundreds of hours of wiretap tapes of key suspects. Written summaries were retained but the loss of originals meant the RCMP couldn't use them to build a court case against the Sikh extremists accused of the bombing.
05/12/07 Jim Brown/The Canadian Press/Toronto Star, Canada

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Categories: Air India - International Dec 2007, Foreign Dec 2007, NACIL Dec 2007, Safety Dec 2007