Privacy rights and wrongs

The big story during my absence was obviously the uproar surrounding the Cons' decision to sweep military casualties under the rug. But for all the parallels between this move and Bushco's longstanding policy, perhaps the most disturbing element to the story is the argument enthusiastically embraced by the Cons to try to defend Harper's decision:

Conservative MPs gave Stephen Harper a standing ovation during a closed-door meeting Wednesday when he told them he will not yield to criticism of the way the government commemorates military deaths.

Sources said the prime minister and Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor went to pains Wednesday during the Conservative weekly caucus meeting to explain the revised protocol for when soldiers are killed abroad...

MP Garth Turner said the issue has been characterized by Harper and O'Connor as one of privacy, and most of his colleagues have accepted the explanation.

"Whether in fact that's a truthful position, in other words whether the media would infringe on privacy, is another matter," Turner said.

Harper's government is of course far from the first to argue that the privacy interests of others should form the basis to cover up inconvenient facts. But while Harper's argument may be somewhat less ludicrous than the more extreme forms adopted by Bushco, it's worth noting that both arguments represent an attempt to turn privacy rights on their head.

After all, the essence of the right to privacy (as with other individual rights) is that it must be held by the individual affected. Which would imply that if the concern really was one of individual privacy, the logical policy would be to determine the wishes of an individual soldier (or failing that, his or her family), and decide what type of public commemoration is considered appropriate accordingly.

But then, that would come with the risk that the individual's views might not be in line with Harper's. As with any other right, different people may have different values: while some families or soldiers may well guard their privacy closely, others would like to see their sacrifices acknowledged more than once a year.

To the extent that this is a rights issue, Canada's soldiers and their families should no more be told how to exercise their privacy rights than any Canadian should be forced to publish a newspaper based on freedom of the press. But then, Harper doesn't invoke soldiers' privacy rights for the purpose of allowing those soldiers to decide how much privacy is important to them.

Instead, Harper based his argument on Bush's all-too-often-implied position that individual rights don't belong to the individual at all. In the Bush/Harper view, others' rights belong only to the government to be wielded as a weapon where politically convenient. And it's not hard to anticipate that like Bush, Harper will be all too eager to ignore those individual rights when they would serve to limit executive power, rather than to provide a specious defence of it.

So much for Harper's initial decision. But judging from today's response, the problem doesn't lie with Harper alone, as his caucus is downright happy to go along with both the argument that privacy is at stake, and the view that Harper knows better than any mere ordinary Canadian how that privacy should be handled. And the degree of support suggests that nobody within the Cons is willing to put the slightest check on Harper's ability to tell Canadians which rights they should and shouldn't see fit to exercise.

None of the above is to say that Harper's policy itself is necessarily disastrous; while I don't see a particularly strong argument in favour of it, the harm is one of the more symbolic ones being inflicted by the Cons at the moment. The bigger problem is with the defence offered by Harper and accepted by his party: if the Cons consider themselves entitled to dictate how military families should balance their individual rights, it's hard to see which Canadians will be immune from the government's attempt to make Canadians' choices for them. And that should give many Canadians pause when they get a chance to determine whether they want Harper to exercise majority - or indeed any - power after the next election.