One of the few book-length discussions of Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, this examination of the legislation passed in Canada shortly after September 11, 2001, documents the governmental debates leading up to the bill's passage and reveals how the court system has interpreted the law and the way the police force has put it into practice. Spotlighting the neglect on behalf of Canada's parliamentarians, this essential record provides evidence that lawmakers voted in favor of the act without having read it and details the unforeseen implications that have led to the incarceration of innocent people. Outlining the new scope of state secrecy and investigating the complicity of Parliament, the courts, and law enforcement, this informative report convincingly argues that the antiterrorism measures are unnecessary and have moved the administration of justice further away from human rights and freedom.

North American law has been transformed in ways unimaginable before 9/11. Laws now authorize and courts have condoned indefinite detention without charge based on secret evidence, mass secret surveillance, and targeted killing of US citizens, suggesting a shift in the cultural currency of a liberal form of legality to authoritarian legality. The Harbinger Theory demonstrates that extreme measures have been consistently embraced in politics, scholarship, and public opinion, not in terms of a general fear of the greater threat that terrorism now poses, but a more specific belief that 9/11 was the harbinger of a new order of terror, giving rise to the likelihood of an attack on the same scale as 9/11 or greater in the near future, involving thousands of casualties and possibly weapons of mass destruction. It explains how the harbinger theory shapes debates about rights and security by virtue of rhetorical strategies on the part of political leaders and security experts, and in works of popular culture, in which the theory is often invoked as a self-evident truth, without the need for supporting evidence or authority. It also reveals how liberal advocates tend to be deferential to the theory, aiding its deeper entrenchment through the absence of a prominent public critique of it. In a unique overview of a range of skeptical evidence about the likelihood of mass terror involving WMD or conventional means, this book contends that a potentially more effective basis for reform advocacy is not to dismiss overstated threat claims as implausible or psychologically grounded, but to challenge the harbinger theory directly through the use of contrary evidence.