Working Paper Series - No. 17-03 August 2017

Critics of C-51 believed that the haste to pass the legislation was in part dictated by the impending general election; some suspected that the Conservative government, anticipating opposition to their proposals from the National Democratic Party and the Liberal Party, were rushing to pass the Bill in order to highlight opposition to the legislation during the election. [...] The significance of procedural justice regarding the willingness of the public, or particular sections of the public, to cooperate with the authorities has been tested in the context of counter-terrorism policing in Australia, the UK and the US (Tyler, Schulhofer and Huq 2010; Huq, Tyler and Schulhofer 2011; Cherney and Murphy 2013; Madon, Murphy and Cherney 2016.). [...] 20 Cherney and Murphy draw a distinction between ‘police legitimacy’ and ‘law legitimacy’; the former is the perceived legitimacy of the police officers enforcing the law, and the latter the ‘perceived legitimacy of the laws that are enforced by the police’. [...] The difference between the Commons and the Senate witness lists was in part a reflection of the differences in the rules that regulate the procedures of the two committees. [...] 47 The interviewee articulates the real and palpable sense of fear expressed by a number of civil-society organisations and activists, who pointed to the treatment of the Canadian Arab Federation and the NCCM as evidence of interconnected strategies, exclusion, vilification, and the defunding and criminalisation of organisations that they felt were applied to Muslim and Arab civil-society groups t.