Crack open the sugared cereal, ’cause it’s Friday, baby. In the news: the Globe and Mail will soon charge for online content; the Mounties and CSIS just want to be liked; southern Etobicoke residents want more attention for the western waterfront; and for all its glitz, Casa Loma is in serious need of cash.

If you like paying for stuff, today (and all days, really) is your lucky day. Unless you don’t read the Globe and Mail, and then you should feel positively smug. But don’t, because your day of reckoning will come. Um. Anyhow, the Globe and Mail has announced that it will soon be going the way [...]

As noted yesterday, the budget implementation bill tabled yesterday by the Conservatives numbers 431…

While activists cheered last week’s news that the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre — better known as Guantanamo North — had finally closed, three of the secret trial detainees who’d been held there still live under indefinite detention without cha…

Listen to a press briefing outside the federal court in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon with remarks from Syed Hussan from the Justice for Mahjoub Network, lawyer Paul Slansky and Mohammad Mahjoub.
From the press release:
Egyptian Refugee Mohammad Mahjoub…

“One of China’s most powerful figures slipped into Ottawa unannounced. Unless you were watching Chinese TV. Li Changchun is ranked No. 5 in the Chinese hierarchy, one of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the … Continue reading →

The Smash the State Report features “March in Review” from the #mediacoop — which looked at #policebrutality against the ongoing #occupytoronto efforts, resistance to the federal budget, and much more!
The Smash the State Report then looks more indept…

” We cannot enter into alliances until we know the designs of our neighbours.” ~ Sun Tzu It should come as no surprise to anyone, that the script of a 6th century general and military strategist has even been converted into a … Continue reading →

Montreal — Community members showed up at the offices of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in Montreal yesterday morning, intent on engaging in a little role reversal. The group came equipped to photograph and interrogate people enteri…

This is the first in a new (ir)regular installment summing up last week’s news headlines using a ‘remix’ style — a quirky restless glance into the wreckless feckless immediate past. (Inspired by Harpers Magazine’s &#8216…

When “Public Safety” Minister Vic Toews released his “new” national security strategy last month, he cautioned the few people paying attention that “no government can guarantee it will be able to prevent all terrorist attacks all the time,” as if such …

A classified U.S. diplomatic cable records how American officials worked with senior Canadian police and security officials to find “work-arounds” to anticipated restrictions on intelligence-sharing even before the Arar commission report went to the pr…

Jim Bronskill from the Canadian Press published a follow-up story on the torture directive that was issued by the Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews. The new story speaks of a more recent directive issued in July 2011.read more

Before Justice Dennis O’Connor had even finished his final report on the Maher Arar case, officials in Paul Martin’s government were meeting with their American counterparts to determine how they could make a key portion of O’Connor&#…

Before Justice Dennis O’Connor had even finished his final report on the Maher Arar case, officials in Paul Martin’s government were meeting with their American counterparts to determine how they could make a key portion of O’Connor’s recommendations irrelevant. Writing at Prism, Jeff Sallot has an article based on an American diplomatic cable that was published by Wikileaks. The cable was written by David Wilkins, then US ambassador to Canada. It describes a series of meetings held in anticipation of O’Connor’s recommendations to discuss "work-arounds" to keep the information flowing from our security forces to theirs. Sallot sought reactions to the cable from Paul Cavalluzzo (among others): Average Canadians would "find it surprising how far their officials would go, to the American altar, bowing down and almost apologizing" to Washington that the Arar case might disrupt or restrict the steady flow of security intelligence from Canada to the U.S., about anticipated fallout from Judge O’Connor’s report, Mr. Cavalluzo said. "What struck me was that a number of Canadian officials were advising the Americans on internal Canadian policy discussions." I’m not all that surprised….

Smash the State Report with G20/injustice news about Kelly Pflug Back, the launch of the People’s Commission Don’t Talk Don’t Cooperate with CSIS campaign, continuing resistance to destructive capitalism/colonialism around the world (HWY blockade in Qu…

Radical historian Luke Stewart joins the show for a discussion on the complicity and the roles of the Canadian government in acts of torture to Canadian citizens and others. We discuss the case of Abdullah Almalki who survived months of torture and of …

CSIS is back in the news, this time defending a policy of paying surprise visits to people at their places of employment. The particular case described in the current news item involves a woman who had previously been visited by agents at her home on t…

CSIS is back in the news, this time defending a policy of paying surprise visits to people at their places of employment. The particular case described in the current news item involves a woman who had previously been visited by agents at her home on three different occasions. At the end of the third visit, a scheduled visit, she informed them that she had nothing more to say. Since CSIS has no law enforcement authority and thus no way to legally compel someone to talk to their agents without involving the police, you might have thought that would be the end of it. Instead they began calling her at work and then showed up there unannounced. This all happened in 2006 and the woman filed a complaint with SIRC. It’s in that context that we’ve learned more about the practice. There’s a memo drafted in 2005 that formally outlines the policy of surprise workplace visits and describes them as "legitimate investigative strategy." Apparently the strategy is employed less frequently than it was at the time but there’s no indication that the policy has been changed or updated. Here’s the public response from the intelligence agency to concerns about it:…

A bit less than a month ago we learned that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews had loosened the rules governing the ability of CSIS to trade in information derived from torture. That was bad enough but it gets worse. The federal government has given Cana…

A bit less than a month ago we learned that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews had loosened the rules governing the ability of CSIS to trade in information derived from torture. That was bad enough but it gets worse. The federal government has given Canada’s spy service the go-ahead to provide information to foreign agencies even when there is a "substantial risk" it will lead to torture, a newly released document shows. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews outlines instructions for sharing information in such cases in a four-page directive to Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Dick Fadden. The directive outlines a set of bullet points to guide him in his decision making but it effectively leaves it up to Fadden to decide when CSIS can share information with a foreign regime that is likely to torture a detainee. Based on what I see here, the following scenario is now perfectly acceptable….