Who's reading your
mail?
The answer could be 'a lot of people from many branches of
government, inside and outside Canada'
by Colby Cosh
RICHARD Kurland did not think too much of it at
first when the government started opening his mail. Every morning,
the immigration lawyer would convene with his colleagues at a table
and ceremonially go through the short notes Canada Customs left to
apologize for their intrusions. Sometimes there would be excuses:
"Envelope damaged by sorting machine," and the like. More often, the
letters would simply bear the brazen stamp of Canada Customs and
Revenue. As someone who had clashed with the government in the past,
Mr. Kurland initially thought he was perhaps being singled out for
special treatment.
He thought wrong. As it turns out, anyone who sends a letter to
Canada from abroad is liable to the same probing. Thanks to changes
made to the Customs Act by the Mulroney government in its last days,
few envelopes are entirely safe from Customs tampering. But don't
worry, says the agency: it's for your own good.
Mr. Kurland's overseas mail started to be opened in 1993, not
long after the Conservative regime altered the Customs Act so that
the agency's right to examine "goods" included letters weighing over
30 grams. If a letter is under that limit, the law says that Customs
needs the permission of the addressee; but Customs agents are not
required to actually weigh the envelope--they can "estimate" its
weight--and anything sent in a priority post or courier envelope is
likely to crack the 30-gram limit.
Mr. Kurland, then a member of the Quebec Bar, thought the
frequency with which his mail was opened reflected his status as an
antagonist of the Conservative government. He had exposed some
due-process-denying shenanigans at the Immigration and Refugee
Board, and had provided NDP MP Svend Robinson with a refugee claim
to introduce on the floor of the Commons during a visit from former
Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. But when he spoke to other
immigration lawyers, he found that similar volumes of their own
correspondence were being tampered with.
After years of Freedom of Information requests and digging, he
was able to come up with evidence of Customs' freewheeling attitude
toward envelope-sniffing. "Very early on, I simply phoned up a
Customs agent and he told me 'Yeah, we open letters, photocopy them
and send the copies to Immigration,'" Mr. Kurland recalls. "But it
took years to get documentary proof of what they acknowledged quite
freely in conversation."
Canada Customs claims the regulations that allow for all this are
necessary to limit the flow of illegal documents into Canada from
abroad. After Mr. Kurland's complaints made national headlines two
months ago, federal Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski launched a
hasty investigation into the agency's procedures, and found that
while the government snoops were remaining within the letter of the
law, the 30-gram distinction was "artificial and
inappropriate."
"While what is taking place is legal and done in good faith," he
wrote, "I nevertheless find aspects of it to be seriously wrong from
the point of view of privacy." He has recommended that Customs seek
a warrant before opening any envelope--whatever its weight--that
does not contain some solid object that could be a laminated
identity card or a passport.
Mr. Radwanski did not comment on Mr. Kurland's documentary
evidence that Customs is working with the Canadian Immigration
Centre to build a database of unsealed private correspondence. The
1992 legislation, the lawyer believes, was part of a push for a
"superministry" of security that would include the RCMP, the
Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Customs, Revenue Canada,
Immigration and other departments. That vision never came to
fruition under the Liberals, but it is clear that at least some of
these units are sharing the information gained from Customs
snoops.
One passage in an Immigration intelligence manual obtained by Mr.
Kurland under the Freedom of Information Act says specifically that
"the mail seizure database will result in the creation of a national
database relating to documentation sent by the mail or by courier
services internationally." Would such a database be restricted to
viewing by Immigration officials? Mr. Kurland is discovering that it
is not only immigration lawyers who seem to have their mail opened
often.
"I'm hearing from blue-chip accountant types in Toronto now," he
says, "the kind of guys who do estate planning. Private individuals
are telling me they're having their tax bills from the U.S. opened.
With Revenue Canada's new reporting requirements on global assets,
we can expect people to start facing uncomfortable questions. 'What
about this condo in Tampa? How'd you pay for it?'"
It does not seem to matter whether you are a citizen or not, nor
whether what they discover is relevant only to some other country.
The federal Immigration Department has signed reciprocal agreements
to share data with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Internal
Revenue Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Bureau and
analogous UK agencies. "I haven't put my mind around the dimensions
of the intrusion," says Mr. Kurland. "This is the worst systematic
violation of civil liberties at the national level since the War
Measures Act."
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