The players have changed. The debate has not. It rages on, as passionate and intense as it was 10 years ago.
In that disquieting fall of 2001, and in the aftermath of the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, two Liberal cabinet members, foreign affairs minister John Manley and justice minister Anne McLellan, struggled over a piece of legislation that threatened the individual freedom of Canadians.
As difficult as that debate was a decade ago in that cabinet room, it promises to be just as tough this time around in the House of Commons.
This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper asserted that Canada’s biggest security threat is “Islamicism,” and vowed to reintroduce two controversial clauses of the Liberals’ Anti-terrorism Act.
The clauses, which dramatically expanded police powers, expired in 2007 during the first Harper minority government – with the support of several Liberals.
The NDP has vowed it will not support the Prime Minister’s plan to bring back the measures. The Liberals say the government must explain why it needs them now.
Surprisingly, however, the Liberal architects of the legislation, Mr. Manley and Ms. McLellan, support Mr. Harper’s move to revive clauses to allow preventive detention and forced testimony.
“I think that they are appropriate in the circumstances in which we now live,” Mr. Manley, now president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, said in an interview this week.
“Given the reality of the world, this is not an unreasonable thing to do,” he added. “We are not talking about water-boarding them.”
Says Ms. McLellan: “I think in terms of the tools in the toolkit to ensure the collective security of Canadians, these are two tools that are worthwhile having there.”
She is back practising law in Edmonton with the national law firm Bennett Jones.
In the weeks after 9/11, prime minister Jean Chrétien created an ad hoc cabinet committee on public security. He asked Mr. Manley to chair it and Ms. McLellan was a member.
It was their job to address the crisis, figuring out how to deal with such issues as a tightening border, transportation security and new justice measures.
Ms. McLellan was to deliver the first legislative package.
“It was a time of great anxiety and nobody wanted to overlook something that resulted in another catastrophic event. That’s the context for Bill C-36,” Mr. Manley said in an interview this week, referring to the anti-terrorism bill. “We actually struggled a lot in cabinet over the whole question of human rights and individual freedoms versus the need to provide security for the population.”
The package included two clauses Ms. McLellan said they knew would be “controversial.” The preventive detention clause allowed police to arrest suspects without a warrant and hold them for up to 72 hours if they believed a terrorist act had been committed. The investigative hearing clause allowed a judge to compel witnesses to testify in secret under penalty of jail if they refused.
Certain safeguards were written into the legislation, such as a three-year review and a sunset clause. Ms. McLellan notes that the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutionality of the investigative hearing clause. The preventive detention clause has not been tested.
Looking back, Mr. Manley said he would not change a thing about the way in which he handled the matter. For him, 9/11 was a turning point in his political career because the prime minister gave him the freedom to respond “according to my instincts.”
“I wasn’t scripted. There was no PMO team telling me what to say and who to say it to,” he remembers. “I gained confidence that I had the instincts to be able to know what to do and what to say in a time of high pressure.”
And like so many other Canadians, he remembers vividly that September day.
Returning from bilateral meetings in Europe, Mr. Manley was in a passenger plane over the Atlantic Ocean when the news broke. He spent the remainder of the flight in the cockpit, listening to the BBC.
He had tried to get through to Ottawa, connecting only briefly and telling his office, “I really think the prime minister needs to make a statement, people are going to be very anxious about this ... the prime minister really needs to get out there, and then we lost the line.”
Ms. McLellan was at a meeting in White Point, N.S., with her provincial counterparts.
It seemed that few of Mr. Chrétien’s senior cabinet ministers were with him in Ottawa. Ms. McLellan managed to get a plane to Ottawa with special permission from Transport Minister David Collenette, who had grounded flights. Likewise for Mr. Manley, whose overseas flight landed in Toronto.
The next day, as the enormity of the situation began to sink in, the prime minister and his cabinet began to plan Canada’s response.
“It was one of those times when people know they need a government,” Mr. Manley said. “There’s a lot of times when people say governments are inefficient, they get in the way, they waste too much money. That was a time when people knew they needed a government.”
