ADAMS: The Liberals are hiding surveillance powers inside a bill about building things

There is an old trick in Canadian politics, and it goes like this. You take a thing everybody wants, say, faster approvals for the mines and ports and rail lines this country has spent two decades failing to build. You wrap it in a flag. Then you staple a few hundred pages of other stuff to the back of it and dare anyone to object.

The Building Canada Strong Act is that trick performed with unusual confidence. The advertised product is "one project, one review, one year." I'm not going to pretend the current permitting regime is anything other than a national embarrassment. If that were the whole bill, I'd have little negative to say about it.

But somewhere past the infrastructure chapters you'll find new powers for authorities to search the contents of your phone. You'll find the scaffolding for a social media ban on minors. You'll find amendments to labour law, environmental assessment, shipping and transportation statutes that have precisely nothing to do with getting a pipeline approved before the geologists retire.

I've read enough of it to know I haven't found everything, and I doubt most MPs have either.

The Conservative from Saskatchewan who has real concerns about device searches gets to explain, on a campaign lawn sign, why he voted against building Canada. The New Democrat who worries about what a youth platform ban does to a gay kid in a town of 900 people gets the same treatment.

Nobody debates the surveillance provisions on their merits because the format was built so nobody would have to. That is what omnibus bills are designed for.

The 2015 election platform that made Justin Trudeau prime minister called omnibus legislation an "undemocratic practice" and promised to end it. Over ten years later, the same party is using the practice to pass powers they haven't bothered to defend individually. You don't need to call that arrogance. You can just call it a pattern, and let readers supply the adjective.

The House already has a tool for this. Standing Order 69.1 lets the Speaker carve up a bill whose parts have no common thread and put each one to a separate vote. It exists. It is rarely used, and it is weak, and the government knows both of those things. Demanding that it be used here is not a radical position.

So here is the modest proposal: split the thing. Let the infrastructure provisions go to a vote and, frankly, probably pass. Let the phone-search powers and social media restrictions stand up in committee on their own merit, and allow Marc Miller to explain himself.

If the lawful access and so-called "safe" social media acts are as necessary as the government implies, separating them should be no issue. But the refusal to separate them tells you what they think the odds are.

Which brings me back to where this outlet has stood since the first of these digital measures surfaced: the Carney Liberals have not made a compelling case for why they need broader access to the contents of our devices or explained what problem a youth social media ban solves that existing laws do not. And most importantly, they have not once shown their work on the harms, on what happens to the trans teen whose only community is online, or the traveller whose phone holds a lawyer's files, or a source's name.

A government asking for new power over people owes people two things: a reason, and evidence it won't hurt them. C-39 offers neither. Instead, it jingles keys in your face and hopes you'll take the deal.

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