Template: Call & Write to Your MPs About Bill C-23

I read this article yesterday about Bill C-23 and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

U.S. border guards would get new powers to question, search and even detain Canadian citizens on Canadian soil under a bill proposed by the Liberal government.

Legal experts say Bill C-23, introduced by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, and likely to pass in the current sitting of Parliament, could also erode the standing of Canadian permanent residents by threatening their automatic right to enter Canada.

I expressed my concerns about it on Twitter in a thread beginning here:

Every passing day feels like a noose tightening around my neck. https://t.co/8s7AAKwi6V pic.twitter.com/r8vw3JB1yO

— Amal El-Mohtar (@tithenai) February 12, 2017

Charles Tan very helpfully storified the rest, for those of you who don’t use the service.

Here, courtesy of Adam Shaftoe (and slightly modified by me in 1st paragraph to add links for the benefit of staffers), is a template for anyone who wants to write to their MP about this issue. I urge you to do so. According to my MP’s office the bill isn’t on the schedule to be discussed this week, so there’s still time to confront its many problems.

I’d also encourage you to write to Ralph Goodale’s office and the Prime Minister’s; from what I recall of working in ministerial correspondence the greatest weight/urgency is given to letters originating from an MP, but in a case like this I think volume matters as much as anything.

[Your MP here]

I’m writing to express my deep concerns about Bill C-23, an act respecting the pre-clearance of persons and goods in Canada and the United States, introduced by Mr. Ralph Goodale (https://openparliament.ca/bills/42-1/C-23/), and discussed in some depth in this CBC article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pre-clearance-border-canada-us-1.3976123

As your constituent and a Canadian citizen, I take particular exception to section 31 of the bill; therein, the bill proposes empowering American Customs and Border Patrol agents, acting as pre-clearance officers, to detain and question Canadian citizens on Canadian soil.

While the spirit of the law pertaining to 31(2) might exist within the realm of reasonable questioning and information gathering, the language is suitably nebulous such that a preclearance officer might interpret section 31(2b), “questioning the traveller for the purposes of indemnifying them or determining their reason for withdrawal,” as a licence to excessive interrogation and detention. It is my opinion that the limitation on section 31 outlined in 31(3), specifically the language surrounding “unreasonable delay” is vague and fails to explicitly protect Canadian citizens from an unconstitutional challenge to their liberty at the hands of foreign nationals.

While I understand that it is a privilege to enter the United States of America, the Charter rights guaranteed to Canadian citizens on Canadian soil do not end in a pre-clearance area. To that end, I would ask you to review this bill, and propose an amendment to its language that would not leave Canadian citizens in Canada beholden to foreign authority and potential abuses of power.

Sincerely yours,

[Your name]