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Senators Walloped with 'Intense' Amount of Anti-C-51 Email

Words like 'horrified' and 'terrified' came up frequently, they report.

Kristie Smith 19 Jun 2015iPolitics

Kristie Smith reports for iPolitics, where this article first appeared.

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Senator Mobina Jaffer has received a whopping 10,000 email messages about C-51 since May.

Many senators say they've been stunned by the overwhelming flood of email they've received over C-51, the highly controversial Harper government security bill that passed a Senate vote earlier in the month.

The vast majority of the messages expressed firm opposition to the legislation; words like "horrified" and "terrified" came up frequently.

Senator Percy Downe of P.E.I. reports having received 6,000 email messages on the bill, 150 from his home province.

"Normally on an issue of importance I might get 20 or 30 at the most from PEI, so this was a lot more," he said.

Senator Joan Fraser received approximately 3,100 messages about C-51, while former RCMP officer Senator Larry Campbell only reported receiving a few hundred.

Senator Mobina Jaffer, an international activist for human and women's rights, has received a whopping 10,000 email messages since May and they continue to trickle in, even though the bill is out of the Senate now.

"But not one letter I got was in favour of C-51 though, and that's not normal," she said.

Senator Grant Mitchell, deputy chair of the Senate committee on National Defence and Security, was the lead critic for the Liberal Senate caucus. He also was involved in the Senate's pre-study of the bill at committee.

He compares his C-51 feedback to the response he got to the Kyoto bill and C-279, NDP MP Randall Garrison's transgender bill of rights, which Mitchell is co-sponsoring through the Senate.

"But C-51 finished ahead. The response has been pretty intense," he said. His office reports that, out of the last 2,000 email messages it has received, only three had nothing to do with C-51.

"It's quite inspiring actually. It's great to see how passionate some Canadians are about this essential rights issue and the nature of Canada."

'Nothing like this'

iPolitics reached out to several Conservative senators; none of their offices provided an estimate of the amount of email they have received either for or against C-51.

Several senators provided iPolitics with a few of the messages they have received, on the condition the senders' names be kept confidential.

Among other things, their messages encouraged the senators to be "on the right side of history" and to "do the right thing for our nation's security and international reputation."

One correspondent, a student too young to vote, said "C-51 is of paramount interest to me as a Canadian... Unable to vote myself, this issue directly impacts my future and my rights as a Canadian citizen... stripping our right to personal privacy is not the solution [to terrorism]."

Several messages reminded the senators that no one should have the right to suspend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Many who identified as first- and second-generation immigrants expressed the fear that Canada is moving away from the values that make it a great place to live.

"When same-sex marriage happened, I got a lot of letters then. But nothing like this," says Jaffer.

The first email her office received came before the bill had even made its way to the House in early May. Since then, only half of the 10,000-plus email messages her staffers have seen have been fill-in-the-blanks missives provided by anti-C-51 campaigns. They were replied to with responses from Jaffer's office, linking to her comments at second and third reading.

Personal email messages were given personal replies, said Jaffer -- "and we stayed up hours and nights just doing that."

"Surprisingly, for the first time that I can ever recall, I received thank-you emails," says Downe.

"Normally you get back to somebody and say, ‘Here's the reasons I'm not supporting the bill', and you never hear from them again. This time I got, I'm guessing 15 or 20 people, thanking me and thanking the Senate for doing its best to stop this."  [Tyee]

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