What a difference a Day makes

From the Department of Doris - Expanding My Empire Division :

" The federal government plans to do more spying abroad, but has yet to decide whether Canada needs a new foreign-intelligence agency, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says.
Amending the CSIS Act, a legislative change that would involve changing only a couple of words in the law, is one approach, he said."

From the General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association :

"The difference one word would make to what CSIS does
It is widely assumed that, if the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) did, in fact, spy on law- abiding postal workers, it would have violated its statutory mandate. This assumption is questionable.
Under the Act, CSIS is allowed to investigate "activities ... in support of ... serious violence ... for the purpose of achieving a political objective within Canada". In the past, the RCMP security service spied on many radicals simply because their ideology was hospitable to revolutionary violence. Yet numbers of these radicals could not organize their laundry, let alone plan serious violence. But, since their ideology made violence acceptable, the RCMP felt justified in snooping on them, even if no violence was being planned at the time.
Despite the urgings of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the government of the day refused to insert the word "unlawful" before the word "activities" in this part of the CSIS mandate."

Which would have made the CSIS mandate : "investigate unlawful activities in support of serious violence for the purpose of achieving a political objective within Canada".

I'm guessing inserting the word "unlawful" is not part of the "changing only a couple of words in the law" that Doris has in mind.

OK, enough of all this. I'm off to organize my laundry really really neatly.