‘There's no place like home,' or so the saying goes. For those concerned about our civil liberties, that may just end up being where you have to stay.
Those living in Western democracies have felt a certain confidence in being cloaked in an inviolable zone of personal security, privacy and autonomy that could not be breached absent compelling state reasons. What made that zone of privacy meaningful was that it was largely portable. It traveled with you like an invisible skin.
The reality of life post-9/11 is that, in the name of collective security, we have been forced to, and largely willingly abdicated, personal privacy. The reasonableness of this in the face of terrorist threats is not really the question because, like a kaleidoscope, that interpretation depends on who is holding it up to the light.
Now, a failed Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound plane has once again allowed for airports and border crossings to become a kind of twilight zone of totalitarianism. Fundamental rights to be secure in your person; to not be subject to unreasonable searches or capricious detentions absent cause, seem to have vanished quicker than your unattended luggage.
A return to normalcy
A teenager in either the US or Canada of 2010 would be forgiven for believing that neither country ever faced threats of terror or acts of collective violence prior to that September morning in 2001. Yet, Canada suffered through its own acts of insurrection during the FLQ crisis of October, 1970.
Then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau infamously declared “Just watch me,” when asked how far he would go to restore and assure order. True to his word, the War Measures Act was implemented only days later. However, de facto martial law was temporary and not established in perpetuity. Our lives were allowed to return to normalcy.
In 1985, Air India Flight 182 was destroyed in flight off the coast of Ireland; an hour earlier, a bomb aboard a CP flight exploded in the luggage compartment while the plane was on the tarmac in Tokyo.
In the wake of these tragedies, Canada did not restructure its society in a misguided attempt to ensure that such an action never happened again. Perhaps it is a uniquely Canadian orientation to realize that ‘peace, order and good government' do not come without risk nor does free mean being forever safe and secure.
The 1990's saw two terrorist attacks on American soil – the WTC bombing of 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Both involved the use of a rented Ryder truck. So, naturally, to keep us all safe, all those renting vehicles immediately became subject to intense questioning, behavioral analysis, pat downs and strip searches. Right?
Wrong. The absurdity of that response would be apparent on its face. Why then have we become so willing to surrender without a fight our basic liberties and human dignity at an airport or border crossing?
Technology has made violations so unobtrusive that we forget how we would react were there not that barrier between those of us being watched and those doing the watching. Most major airports will be equipped with full body scanners in the very near future which allows for the indignity of what amounts to a strip search without all the fuss and bother of removing clothing.
It has long been the squawk of those who care little for personal liberty that if one “has nothing to hide then one has nothing to fear.” These are the same people for whom a constitution is nothing more than a placemat: nice to bring out at parties (don't spill anything on it!) but really having no function other than decorative to impress the Soviets if they ever come to dinner again.
The more frightening fact is that a right, once abrogated or surrendered, is never fully realized again. The wonder is not that it has happened – that's what governments do. The wonder is that it is happening with, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, not a bang but with nary a whimper of real protest.
Tug of war
The paradox of civil liberties is that they initially arise and are first established out of a population feeling an unwarranted and intolerable intrusion upon their private lives. They are then perpetually subject to being defended from similar intrusions – undertaken this time, not by the authority against whom a population revolted – but by the very structure put in place to supplant and guarantee those hard-won freedoms.
The perpetual tug of war between the individual and the state depends on vigilant assertion and stubborn insistence on civil liberties. Those rights are no more acutely in danger than when that individual must battle, not only the state, but a significant portion of fellow citizens who see no harm in surrendering certain liberties in the face of a real or imagined threat.
It is the height of irony that perhaps the shining moment in US- Canada relations occurred when fake passports were issued to Americans who had taken refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran. These passports allowed the threatened Americans to leave the Embassy and safely travel by air to safety. Given the paranoia now present, it would be darkly comical to see if such a flight to freedom would be viewed today as a triumph or an unforgivable lapse in security.
“Come fly with me,” used to be a friendly invitation to adventure and fellowship. These days, it is sounding more and more like a threat.
Gavin MacFadyen is a lawyer and freelance writer living in New York State. Past work has appeared in the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, The Globe and Mail, the Buffalo News and on CBC Radio.
