A Blog CALLED INTREPID
Discussing and debating Canadian national security law and policy.
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The invitation of the government of Ukraine for individuals from around the world to join a foreign legion created for its self-defence, and the seeming ambiguity of the Canadian government’s attitude to this has raised a number of legal questions about those who may choose to do so. This short piece provides an overview of a number of legal issues this situation raises.
Late on Wednesday, February 17th, 2022, the Governor-In-Council (effectively cabinet) tabled a series of documents as part of a motion for consideration of a declaration of an emergency in the House of Commons under the Emergencies Act. In order to help Intrepid readers understand what Parliament is voting on, Leah West has prepared a helpful chart. It identifies the legal threshold required to find that a public order emergency exists, and the justification offered by Cabinet in support of that declaration in the documents laid before the House.
The Anti-Terrorism Act 2001 brought Part II.1 of the Criminal Code into being and with it, Canada’s terrorism offences. In the twenty years since that time, 62 individuals have been charged with terrorism offences by our counting. This blog post is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of the field. Instead, we set out merely to remind the reader of what constitutes a terrorism offence in Canada and then review some of the trends that we can see from the prosecuting and charging numbers to date.
This blog post is a medium for providing a series of tables that provide information on all terrorism cases and charges to date—a public release of information collected over the past five years that, I hope, will be of interest to students, lawyers, national security practitioners and academics. The tables strive to provide further information related to each of these cases, such as the specific offences charged, whether individuals were convicted or not, their sentences, and so on.
We’re pleased to launch a new component of the growing INTREPID empire: mini-courses. Right now, we’ve put together around 5 hours of explainer video modules covering the basis of Canadian national security law. We may or may not make more courses, if we can persuade ourselves there is a business case for spending many hours doing so. But right now, our first mini-course is free and open for “enrolment” — “enrolment” means creating a sign-in account on the learning management platform we use. You can find the link under “University” in the menu above or here.
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In the news
Bill C-59
Bill C-59, the National Security Act 2017, is now back before the Commons to consider the (relatively minor) amendments proposed by the Senate. Baring a catastrophe, it should make it past this final Commons-Senate ping-pong and become law. “Becoming law” means “coming into force”. There are rules about coming into force, and I review how they apply to C-59 because: it’s complicated.
Lurking in the details of bill C-59 are new features in the law of evidence whose impact is uncertain. In this blog series, Leah West examines the new “class privilege” in the law of evidence created for those entities assisting CSE, and compares it the class privileges existing elsewhere in Canadian law, including under the CSIS Act.
Lurking in the details of bill C-59 are new features in the law of evidence whose impact is uncertain. In this blog series, Leah West examines the new “class privilege” in the law of evidence created for those entities assisting CSE, and compares it the class privileges existing elsewhere in Canadian law, including under the CSIS Act.
Student BloGS
Observations on the Russian legal posture in the Ukraine conflict.
We’re pleased to launch a new component of the growing INTREPID empire: mini-courses. Right now, we’ve put together around 5 hours of explainer video modules covering the basis of Canadian national security law. We may or may not make more courses, if we can persuade ourselves there is a business case for spending many hours doing so. But right now, our first mini-course is free and open for “enrolment” — “enrolment” means creating a sign-in account on the learning management platform we use. You can find the link under “University” in the menu above or here.
In the second post in our student series, JD/MA student Gabriella Colavecchio unpacks the implications of an impending constitutional challenge to the use of secret evidence to deny a Canadian with alleged connections to Al Shabaab a passport under the Canadian Passport Order and the Prevention of Terrorist Travel Act.
In the first in a series of posts by graduate students from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Graeme Hamilton explores the role of CSE in countering online disinformation and defending Canadians from opportunistic cyber-threat actors.
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