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Harper's Border Deal Expands the National Security State
The Canada-U.S. "Beyond the Border" agreement announced in December 2011 promotes bilateral "friendship, sharing, and collaboration." These are excellent values. They are instilled in kindergarten. But if Canada wants to build an adult relationship with the United States, we need to openly address issues of civil rights, due process and accountability.
Nowhere is this more the case than with respect to the dramatic changes proposed for North American security. Numerous privacy concerns have already been raised with respect to increased data-gathering and cross-border information sharing. Very little attention, however, has yet been directed to the worrisome proposals for more integrated cross-border law enforcement.
Under the Beyond the Border agreement, the Shiprider pilot program will be standardized. Shiprider is an extension of Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs) which enable bilateral information and intelligence-sharing across the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the U.S. Customs and Border Protection/Office of Border Patrol, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Coast Guard. The main target of IBETs has been organized crime such as drug smuggling, contraband weapons and human trafficking.
The Shiprider program will extend IBETs to shared waterways and seaways, and will also permit cross-border law enforcement. Designated RCMP and U.S. Coast Guard officers will jointly operate vessels on patrol, and will be authorized to enforce the law on either side of the border. The Harper government has also tabled legislation, Bill C-60: Keeping Canadians Safe (Protecting Borders) Act, that would bestow these designated officers with enforcement capabilities equivalent to the RCMP -- anywhere in Canada!
It is clear, therefore, that these cross-border law enforcement arrangements are not just about information-sharing. They are about creating interoperable security practices and personnel. As such they raise troubling questions regarding accountability, due process and civil rights.
When and where does a cross-border initiative start and end? Who decides? Who has jurisdiction over the information that is gathered? Who is responsible if something goes wrong? How might national security concerns be used to sidestep the law with respect to these designated officials?
Another "Beyond the Border" pilot project, Next-Generation, also raises concerns with regards to its widening security mandate. Next-Generation officers will be located between ports of entry. Like the IBETs, the Next-Generation program will facilitate intelligence and information-sharing. They will also, like the Shiprider program, allow designated officers to enforce the law on either side of the border.
But Next-Generation will also expand the security mandate of these officers by drawing together organizations responsible for the defence of national security: the RCMP, Public Safety Canada, the Department of Justice Canada, the US Department of Justice and the US Department of Homeland Security. These are not just border agencies, but agencies mandated with the full weight of national security.
The "Beyond the Border" agreement will also bring Canada more closely in line with the extensive reach of the Department of Homeland Security. Criminal infractions can now be treated with the full force of threats to national security. But, for example, is the selling of contraband cigarettes a matter of national security? Are smugglers of prescription drugs on a par with terrorists?
As the title "Beyond the Border" suggests, the agreement is not just about efficient trade or border security. It is not about those kindergarten values of playing nicely together, sharing toys and secrets. This agreement is about deepening and extending the national security mandate across the two countries, well away from the border.
The public discussion about this border deal needs to grow up fast, in order to cut through the government's infantilizing PR and face up to the ways that the Harper government is expanding the national security state, both in domestic policy and in our international relations.
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25 Comments so far
Show Allwelcome to the new reality.
the united states will now police canada for their own protection.
don't you feel safer now?
oh, and there will be a significant charge for said protection, not just money but in loss of sovereignty.
btw, what about harper/obama signing a bilateral agreement authorizing either government to call upon each other's troops in case of a national emergency?
welcome to Amerika!
Obama and Harper are just making sure that competitively priced medications and single-payer medical insurance don't invade the US via the Canadian border.
I'd say you could be right, but they may also be making sure that the damnable Keystone pipeline is approved after the 2012 presidential election, no matter who wins. Harper was re-elected in 2011, most unfortunately. I thought Canadians were smarter than that.
The system is rigged. Over 60% of us voted for someone other than Harper yet he gets a formidable majority government... so most of us are smarter than that, it just was not enough.
The corporations have figured out how to buy governments in every nation.
Meanwhile the US backed drug war in Mexico has left +/- 50,000 dead with no end in sight. Mexico makes the drugs; America makes the guns, and the .001% on both side of the fence maker the profit.
Obama turns a blind eye this tragic "war" while promising hope to the Mexican undocumented. Mexican oil, labor, trade and drugs are more important to the US economy than the fate of the US middle class and the good people of Mexico.
I call for a mass drug war asylum exodus to the US. Tens of thousands of Mexicans coming from Mexico and within the US - unite in an occupy asylum demonstration. Shut the system down and expose it for the lie that it is.
http://twopesos-protestfortheundocumented.blogspot.com/2011/12/us-and-mexican-1-are-tag-team-raping-us.html
Several years ago a North American Summit featured three leaders assuming to make Big Decisions for the future, from which the current border ideas began. On stage stood George W. Bush, a man serving a second illegitimate term in office having twice orchestrated massive voter manipulation; Stephen Harper, leading a Minority parliament with lukewarm support at best from the Canadian populace; and Felipe Calderon, who came to power on the heels of massive vote fraud (statistical analysis showed his victory was impossible). Bush and Calderon managed to completely transform their nations - for the worse - and Harper only now is getting started, having finally worn down the public into giving him full power.
Emily Gilbert's perspective from Toronto rather subtly and indirectly reflects how the United States' relationship to international law and human rights continues to deteriorate.
Once upon a time not too long ago (generally, throughout the Cold War era) the United States openly embraced "civil rights, due process and accountability" as positive national virtues, at least when American principles were being contrasted with the structure and behavior of police state authoritarian regimes. Entering into a bilateral agreement with the United States government to cooperate in future law enforcement activities usually was seen as virtually all upside, with little downside risk. The yanks would probably at least play by the rules that they preached about.
Not so any more. "Numerous privacy concerns about data gathering and information sharing..... deepening and extending the national security mandate..... expanding the national security state" - these are now concerns that should be taken into account by sensible foreign nations contemplating closer cross border law enforcement ties with the United States.
How sad. How revealing.
Bill from Saginaw
Emily Gilbert is in the correct field. Canada has more geography per person than any nation on Earth. It has a population 8/9 of California and, were it moved down there, Canada would float like an iceberg.
In 1939 the FBI and the RCMP became Henry Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzhenry with regard to North Americans of Japanese descent. They colluded this far in advance WRT the Registration of Japs in each country, and made plans for =collaring the lot= if war commenced. Each nation would relocate their Japs.
Castigating Steven Harper is rather like kicking an open barn door. The time to act was when Ralph Klein was Premier of Alberta, and then his illegitimate son Mike Harris became Premier of Ontario. I acted in real time against both those dangerous men, and paid a heavy price for my intransigent confrontation. But I'd do it again.
I regard Steven Harper as deluded as the engineer in a steam locomotive, pulling a long train of boxcars to Auschwitz. All ABOARD !!!!
Trylon
The same metaphor applies to Obama.
When I read an article like this, my mind flashes to the film,"Brazil" (by Terry Gilliam), as it so powerfully depicts what can happen in a surveillance state that places so much emphasis on "Information Retrieval." In the instance depicted, a mere spelling error has an innocent bystander arrested in lieu of a "terrorist." (The film is an amazing visual display of prescience, done as it was, long before the 911 pretext to "lock 'em all up," and sort it out later was put into operation.)
When there's no valid legal mode of redress, discerning innocence from guilt doesn't much matter. And as Guy de Maupassant pointed out in his poignant short story, "A Piece of String," it's virtually impossible to prove one's innocence!
One of my closest friends resides in Puerto Rico, and recently told me that she's now a victim of "Identity Theft." I presume that lots of banks, big companies, and credit orgs made high profits by doing so much business on-line. So they gain in the way of greater ease of transactions what the public (i.e. consumers) often lose in the way of security. Just as occupiers seize assets and leave collateral damage for those "left behind," in most of life's transactions the empowered players develop rules that protect their own interests at great, often grave cost to everything else.
We're not citizens! We're all consumers residing in corporate states now.
Was that Tuttle or Buttle?
Brazil is one of my favorite films. I did not see it as being a prediction of the future, but rather as a depiction of one man's madness that was used to criticize the then present by showing what some trends carried to absurdity would look like. It would be interesting to read Gilliam's comments on the film today. The trouble is that the future (present) is moving too close towards what Gilliam depicted when taking his argument to absurdity.
We Canadians are occasionally allowed to sit on the sidelines to listen when the decisions affecting our sovereignty get announced. Our input is not wanted. No one making decisions wants a discussion with us about being annexed and so Harper does it mostly in the shadows.
In olden days, somebody had to produce a =White Paper= for public consumption in advance of decision making. Copies went to public libraries.
In olden days there were journalists tough enough to stand up to the powers that be and ask tough questions. Here in Michigan I miss Barbara Frum.
Do you know when things began to change? They began to change the year when Toronto cops began telephoning homes and telling the person who answered there was a Police Widows & Orphans Association. A donation of $50 or $100 or $more would result in receipt of a color coded =Friend of the Police= bumper sticker. If you demurred, you were invited to send $25 but you would not get a bumper sticker.
This is called "standing on guard for thee." Or - a wheeze tendon guard for hockey fans.
Trylon
In olden days we had something a bit closer to democracy. It is time to once again dream of and to discuss how to better organize ourselves so that we get back into and stay in the loop and will have some influence in the choices that is more akin to what it should be based on our numbers and abilities.
In high school, when our first papers were due in an English class taught by a teacher who had a very tough reputation, we whispered about the content of our papers as we turned them in. My "take" on the Shakespeare play, I think it was Richard III, was so different from that of my classmates, that I thought I'd get a poor grade.
As it turns out, the teacher, who later became very friendly with me, was an Aquarian (and therefore drawn to the unconventional viewpoint, if logically argued); and when the papers were graded and passed back, guess who got the highest grade in the class?
I'm sharing that because you and I see "Brazil" at a 180-degree angle. You focus, like a libertarian does on individual choice, on the so-called man's "madness." His madness was a direct response to the madness around him. How about lunching with his rich Mom as terrorist attacks break out? Plus the film regards these explosions in a banal manner, strongly suggesting that terrorist attacks have become the norm.
How about the ministry of truth, a friend of the family conducting very real torture on those suspected of operating against the state?
How about a form for every purpose that an authoritarian government can dream up.
And then some.
Sure, he escaped the macabre world of nothing but empty dead streets, but for their manmade distractions, into the wings of a woman who was connected to nature. Her equal wish to escape to green fields, an extension of his fantasy.
When you make the film about one man and his mental state, you miss everything. I think Mr. A would have given me the 97 and you the 86 on this one.
I would have been astonished to see an 86 on anything that I penned in school as my marks peaked at somewhere around 70.
It is likely that Sam Lowery's madness was a direct response to the madness about him, he being but a cog in an immense and strongly hierachal bureaucratic structure. Living under such rigid top-down structures is to some extent living in an environment of madness and is quite painful mentaly and spiritually for any being with heart or conscience, and I truely feel for the many bureaucrats and citizens (subjects?) in the present structures that work to maintain their humanity in the face of the relentless pressure to be but a cog in the structure.
At the beginning of the movie Gillian gives us an interesting clue as to what is happening. He mentions in text that the events take place in the second half of the twentieth century. In otherwords, as the movie was in theatres in 1985, the time period of the movie was basically the present at that time, not the future. And all through the movie the laws of physics are distorted and flaunted and dreamlike. The movie has the atmosphere of a nightmare and the terrorist attacks during the lunch with his mother could as easily be interpreted as a dream sequence as the scenes where Sam is soaring through the sky with wings. I think that you will have a difficult time pointing to a scene in the movie that cannot easily be intrepreted as a dream or nightmare sequence.
Where we agree is that the film is not about one man and his mental state. The mad do see some reality, and quite probably parts of it more clearly than most of us. The social and organizational realities presented to us in the movie are shown to us through the filter of Sam Lowery's mind.
It has been ten years since I watched the movie. Time to watch it again. I may not agree with the above afterwards. 86! nice. tx.
Why did it take 6 weeks for this story to finally make semi-mainstream news regarding the ramifications of the Beyond the Border Pact?
Thanks for getting this information out to more people.
Everyone in Canada needs to understand that the moment they cross the border into the USA, their background information is handed over to the US Border Patrol which systematically turns it over to numerous security branches of the USA; at that point, these branches all use their own criteria to determine whether you are a risk and warrant further scrutiny. Such scrutiny, a baseless declaration that you are a threat to US interests for example, can entail coming into Canada to arrest you.
We have been completely sold out and turned over to the surveillance and security state of America. "This land is my land, this land is your land..."
Basically, the entire continent is now in a state of unofficial lock-down. And to the poster who related the human resource content of the Three Stooges Political Convention, good insight. What it shows is that there has never been even the pretext of a majority (of voters) behind these increasingly authoritarian policies moving across Canada-US-Mexico. The state wants to peer into the lives of its citizens, as if we each now reside in a glass house... but it arrogates to itself, the "right" to make all the most significant decisions in closed, secret meetings; and woe unto any who leak any information considered sensitive to "The Controllers" Cause(s)." Yeah, this sure is the kind of freedom to export at bayonet point!
And whispers reverberate....
"You know too much, frauline!"
Harper and his government are treacherous. They are selling our Canadian birthright for a mess of pottage. Canadians have grown up over the years and we have a healthy distrust of America. That country does nothing, nothing that isn't in its own benefit regardless of the harm it does to others. If the current government doesn't know this, it should be relegated to the backbenches before it destroys the country. I for one as an ordinary Canadian will never allow a foreign police agent to attempt to arrest me in my own country. If American security agents want a fight just try it. It sounds to me very much like Harper is trying to legalize American covert renditions right here in Canada. It makes me sick!
Good article! Stephen Harper looks like he might soon be eligible for "honorary US citizenship" for the empire if this keeps up. But the good Canadian people may have cure for what ails their body politic with the NDP.
North America so misused by so many! It doesn't mean the USA, Mexico, and Canada' but all the countries from Canada down to Colombia. Sorry about the seeming pedantry.
More pedantry! All parliamentary parties whether government or opposition have front and back benches. That has nothing to do with which party is in government. The party in government occupies the government rather than the opposition benches.
Inadvertent duplication deleted.
Odd is it not that Harper is also pushing to have celebrations in honor of the war of 1812 which ensured Canada would remain independent of the United States of America?
We need a Tecumseh not another corporate lackey.
Gilbert sez: "The Harper government has also tabled legislation, Bill C-60: Keeping Canadians Safe (Protecting Borders) Act ..."
***
How much are Canadian taxpayers providing Herr Rove to pen the titles for Harper's bills?
Last week Harper anounced at Davos that he was attacking the social security system in Canada. That has raised a lot of noise around here. He would not now have two seats in parliament, nevermind a majority, had he mentioned that idea before the election.
It seems to me that a major purpose of Harper's Davos announcement of the attack on social security is to provide a smoke screen with which to distract from and mute the debate and discussion of Bill C-60. The odius nature of this "Keeping Canadians Safe(Protecting Borders) Act is briefly discussed above by Emily Gilbert.
As a Canadian I don't feel safer knowing that the passage of Bill C-60 is likely. Quite the reverse.
The Cops in Chicago in a 6 monh period shot dead more citizens then the cops in all Canada did in a 5 year period. And those thugs are going to keep us safe?