If Bill C-51 receives royal assent, judges will have the power to authorize police investigators in advance to violate people’s constitutional rights, and the legislation facilitates the sharing of sensitive personal information with foreign governments.
It’s making its way through Parliament after an RCMP intelligence report released earlier this year declared that the “growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement” is a rising security threat.
“You’ve got a 20th-century approach to intelligence in a 21st-century world—in a world of social media,” Naidoo said in an interview at the Georgia Straight office. “I mean, 90 percent of anything they want to know about me they can go and seek on Twitter.”
Naidoo said governments of Canada and other countries are increasing surveillance of the environmental movement because it’s no longer a “fringe” issue.
“Everything Greenpeace is saying, the UN intergovernmental panel on climate science is saying,” Naidoo said. “That’s the biggest scientific enterprise in the history of human science.”
He added that the environmental movement is “unrecognizable” from what it looked like 20 or 30 years ago. He described Greenpeace as a “catalytic organization” that assists others, including indigenous peoples who are standing up to defend ecological assets. He noted that more faith-based groups are joining this fight and predicted that the Pope will soon present an encyclical on human ecologies.
“The environmental movement is not just Greenpeace, WWF [World Wildlife Fund], Friends of the Earth, and some national organizations,” he said. “It’s the women’s movement. It’s the youth movement. Let’s be blunt about it: climate change is a game-changer on our side in terms of organizing because it’s completely cross-cutting.”