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Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t donations to political causes required to be public record in the United States? Or, is that only for donations candidates but not to causes?

I also assume that the funding site is required to turn over this data to CSIS anyways, unless they actively ensure that only Canadians are being permitted to donate. Otherwise they risk being treated as an enemy of the Canadian state for ‘clandestine’ foreign interference in Canada’s interests, as keeping that list secret from CSIS while accepting foreign (non-Canadian) donations would exempt them from the political protest protections in the CSIS act, and expose themselves to risk of extradition to Canada.

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Well, Canadian NGOs can legally receive donations globally. It's not a political party or a candidate, but an NGO.

e.g. would Americans donating to Amnesty International in Canada be considered an act of political interference? Seems like a stretch. People donate to charities of their choosing globally all the time, in fact, quite often to NGOs/charities that disagee with their local governments on quite a few things.

What is the CSIS act, and it's "political protest protections"? Seems really weird, you'd expect the fundamental right to protest in a democracy would be constitutionally enshrined, rather than "protected" under some law. This right is presumed, and the constitution simply recognizes its existence, but maybe in monarchies this is different, and rights are bestowed on the subjects by the monarch?

It seems to me, that if you need a law to "protect" the right to protest, you might be living in a country that isn't quite a democracy.

All democracies aren’t quite a democracy, by your logic, which is certainly accurate enough. All democracies must protect against foreign interference (PsyOps) in domestic politics and protests, and such protection runs directly counter to the right of non-violent dissidence; thus, by abrogating individual rights to any degree whatsoever through laws, tolerances, and actions, every country can be said not be “not quite a democracy” on a long enough timescale. However, the degree to which each democracy tolerates and shields nonviolent dissidence versus the interests of the country itself varies wildly per country, both in degree and substance.

Canada is no exception, encoding its protections of that intersection into the CSIS act. If you’d like to learn more about CSIS, these links are a good first step towards understanding how Canada’s laws govern foreign interference and how and when they protect domestic rights:

https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corpo...

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-23/

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