Headlines for 10 February 2010

Vancouver denies permit for Olympic protesters

In Vancouver, members of the 2010 Welcoming Committee, a group organizing protests of the Vancouver Olympic games, are disappointed to not have been able to obtain permits from the city to hold a demonstration and a march.

With or without approval from city hall, anti-Olympic activists will hold a rally on the afternoon of February 12 on the north lawn of the Vancouver Art Gallery. They will then march to B.C. Place, which will be hosting the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Games that evening.

“We’re going to exercise our democratic rights as Canadians to protest,” Robert Ages of the 2010 Welcoming Committee told the [Georgia] Straight.

The group has apparently been told by the city that "formal approval is being withheld to ensure that the northern plaza remains accessible as there are multiple events already approved for the area”.

The same office, according to organizers, also passed along their application for a march to the Vancouver Police Department, which, on normal occasions, only supervises temporary road closures for marches approved by city hall.

“This development is troubling, because without approval from the city, the police could simply terminate the rally and/or march,” organizers told [city] councillors in the letter

COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth [said] there’s no reason why city hall should deny the coalition a permit to use the north lawn of the art gallery, a traditional site of protests in Vancouver.

Canadian customs refuses to disclose laptop search policy

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has ignored a freedom of information request from the BC Civil Liberties Association asking for their policy around searching laptops of people entering Canada. The request asked a number of questions, including whether border guard policies allow for making copies of information on people's laptops, and whether they can demand people to reveal passwords to encoded information on their computers.

When the CBSA responded, after the maximum 30 days the law allows for such a response, they indicated that they would need an additional 60 days to process the request. This additional 60 days passed at the start of this month, still with no response from the CBSA.

The BC Civil Liberties Association are pledging to follow up on this issue, saying they will

post more about the work we’ve done on border searches of personal electronics, including why searches of electronic devices should matter to Canadians, and what we do know about CBSA policy. Once we get some documents from the CBSA, we’ll post those too.