Senate bill to protect journalist sources gets media backing

Editors from some of the country’s largest news organizations are backing a Senate bill that aims to protect confidential sources from unwarranted police intrusion.

Thestar.com
Feb. 15, 2017
By Alex Ballingall

Editors from some of the country’s largest news organizations are backing a Senate bill that aims to protect confidential sources from unwarranted police intrusion.

Speaking before a Senate committee studying the bill, the media executives said the new law would help safeguard the anonymity of whistleblowers from official prying and thus protect investigative reporting that aims to expose wrongdoing and corruption in the public interest.

“It’s of particular concern to me that Canada is one of a few ... Western democracies without some form of journalist shield law. It’s a very tiny club and we should not be a member,” said Michael Cooke, editor of the Toronto Star.

“Such revelations of public interest ... would not have been possible without the contribution of those anonymous sources who trust journalists to protect them,” he said.

The bill, which had its first reading in the Senate last year, seeks to amend two government laws - the Evidence Act and the Criminal Code - to protect journalists’ sources from being identified or placed under surveillance by the police.

The bill’s architect, Quebec Sen. Claude Carignan, said sources are “essential” to the work of journalists. Without proper protection, institutional wrongdoing such as the sponsorship scandal that embroiled the federal Liberals more than a decade ago could go unexposed, he said.

The changes would stipulate that the identity of sources would be revealed only in rare circumstances, and would involve a hearing before a judge to determine whether the information could be obtained anywhere else.

Further, any evidence gathered by surveillance of journalists’ sources would be sealed. Reporters and their news organizations would be notified and given the right to appeal any move by police to access information gathered from such investigations, Carignan said.

“I urge you to adopt this bill in the public interest,” he said.

The concerns around protecting sources have been underscored by recent revelations that investigators with Montreal’s police force spied on a newspaper columnist to find out which of its members was leaking information to the media.

The hope is that the bill could put an end to these so-called “fishing expeditions” for journalists’ sources that police want to identify. “These sources experience immense stress,” said Éric Trottier, associate editor of La Presse. “We think the bill will reassure a lot of people.”

While the police surveillance activities have mainly centred on reporters in Quebec, media executives told the committee that the concerns are felt in newsrooms across the country and has given new urgency to the need for greater protections.

In November, for instance, the director of CSIS admitted that the national spy agency might have snooped on journalists in the past.

Trottier said the disturbing news that his own journalists were being shadowed by police laid bare what he called a “new reality” for Canadian journalists.

“We thought that this kind of thing would never happen in a constitutional democracy like Canada,” he said.

“It is therefore essential that we strike a better balance between police forces and the media. The measures proposed by this bill reset this balance,” Trottier said.

Right now, under common law in most of Canada, as well as in Quebec, the Supreme Court of Canada has held that journalistic sources may be protected, but that the protection is to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, said the publicity around the police monitoring of journalists has already had a chilling effect on journalists’ interactions with sources.

“It has slowed down our newsgathering ability,” he said.

The senators appeared largely in favour of the private member’s bill, though they quizzed Carignan and the news executives about the logistics of its implementation, notably how to define a “journalist.”

Cooke said the definition should draw on the Supreme Court ruling on libel that sets journalism in the public interest as a standard. “The court will, I think, rightly determine in the end, and it will become common law, what kind of journalism applies to these protections,” he said.

As a private member’s bill, it’s far from assured that it will become law. But Carignan is hoping it will win strong support in the Senate and that the Liberal government will move to enact it.