"It was the 1970s – a time when this country was reeling from revelations about out-of-control spy services. The RCMP had burned down a barn in Quebec to prevent a meeting between Quebec separatists and U.S. radicals, broken into journalists’ offices, infiltrated legitimate protest groups, stolen political-party membership lists."

Forty years later and security forces are still engaging in illegal practices. Now security agents monitor journalists' cell-phones and data exchanges. Legitimate protest groups are infiltrated and INCITED to unlawful behavior. In at least one case the police provided a would-be terrorist with the training and materials to construct a bomb. And the government recently rewrote the law to make committing arson (and numerous other serious crimes) legal for security agents. Worst of all perhaps, security agencies today use mass electronic surveillance against innocent Canadians.

We've gone backwards, not forwards in this area.