"Raid brings widespread condemnation
Mike Blanchfield
CanWest News Service
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
OTTAWA - A Liberal senator has joined the chorus of opposition critics who have denounced RCMP raids on the home and office of an Ottawa Citizen reporter and compared them to the police-state actions of the former Soviet Union.
“Juliet O’Neill is a solid journalist who was simply trying to shed more light on a complex story,” Senator Jim Munson, a former television broadcaster and chief spokesman for former prime minister Jean Chretien, said Wednesday.
“I am very concerned that the rights of journalists may be trampled.”
Munson, who worked as a television journalist for more than 25 years, was appointed to the Senate last month shortly before Chretien stepped down.
Chretien’s successor was as surprised as anyone at the RCMP raids, according to a spokesman, but Prime Minister Paul Martin did not add his voice to the widespread condemnation of the police investigation into leaks in the Maher Arar case.
"A lot of people seem to think this is the beginning of something wider to intimidate journalists and all that. I can tell you that that is certainly not the intention or the desire in any way, shape or form of the prime minister," Mario Lague, Martin's chief spokesman, said Wednesday.
Martin was on his way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and unavailable for comment Wednesday. Lague said the Prime Minister's Office found out about the raids through media reports.
Martin's aides moved swiftly to distance the prime minister from any suggestion that he was connected to the raids, which have sparked outrage among opposition politicians and lawyers.
Martin has said he wants to get to the bottom of a series of leaks in the case of Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian who was deported by U.S. authorities to his native country because they suspected he was an al-Qaida terrorist. Arar, who was tortured in Syria, strongly denies the allegations and has launched a lawsuit against the U.S. government to clear his name.
Opposition critics condemned the raids in response to a November story O’Neill wrote on what the federal government knew about Arar and his deportation.
O’Neill, who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent in Moscow in 1989, was subjected to the same sort of heavy-handed police-state tactics that marked decades of Communist rule, critics charged.
“It doesn’t seem like the Canada my dad fought for,” said Grant Hill, the acting leader of the official Opposition.
“It seems a little bit like another northern country that not so long ago had a police state. We’re talking about the U.S.S.R. That’s the sort of thing I would expect from a police state.”
Stephen Harper, the former opposition leader now running for the Conservative Party leadership, condemned the raids as dangerous and disturbing.
“I think this whole incident is disturbing. I think this whole desire to suppress information, rather than have a public inquiry and get to the bottom of it, is dangerous,” said Harper.
New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton said he had no doubt the raids were intended to send a chill through the journalistic community.
“It’s an abomination, the ultimate transgression,” Layton said. “It’s like something out of Kafka.
“This puts a chill on political discussion. It’s outrageous, appalling, a body blow to democracy. It’s nothing more than the politics of fear.”
Former Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay said he had serious questions about the tactics used by the RCMP.
“The RCMP’s tactics seem excessive in light of the facts as currently known. I would suggest a different approach would have been sufficient and less intimidating,” said MacKay, who is also a former Crown prosecutor.
Liberal MP John Bryden, a former journalist, acknowledged that the RCMP have a duty to protect classified information, but said the use of search warrants to forcibly track down documents should only be used when public safety is at risk.
"I'm very uncomfortable when any journalist is raided for documents," said Bryden, arguing that journalists and MPs often have similar roles searching for information about the government or police and security service activities.
NDP MP Svend Robinson said the police raid underscores the need for an inquiry into the role of the RCMP in Arar's deportation.
"This appears to be an attempt to silence and muzzle the journalists that are asking questions that reinforce the need for an independent public inquiry," said Robinson. "Journalists are digging at information that could be embarrassing to the RCMP. It's potentially a pretty serious abuse of police power if it's an attempt to muzzle and silence them."
Liberal MP Derek Lee, however, chair of the Commons sub-committee on national security in the last session of Parliament, said journalists have no unique privileges under the law.
"While we all have a special place in our heart for journalists, there actually is no special protection for journalists when it comes to dealing with classified information," he said, adding the Mounties were likely searching O'Neill's home and office in an attempt to identify the person who leaked the information.
"If they have a warrant, they have convinced a judge that there has been an offence committed and that there is a chain of evidence and someone is responsible, so they could get a search warrant to follow that stuff through," said Lee, also a lawyer.
(Ottawa Citizen with files from Mark Kennedy in Zurich and Tim Naumetz in Ottawa.)"
http://www.canada.com/national/story.asp?id=1EC02A65-411A-48A8-9EDD-D648B1A299F3I have never been more ashamed to be a Canadian.
