TORONTO, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- It couldn't have been more embarrassing for Paul Martin. In far away Davos, Switzerland, surrounded by high and mighty at the World Economic Forum, the Canadian prime minister was trying to prove that he is not presiding over a totalitarian state.
Instead of working in economic issues at the forum, Martin was distancing himself from the fallout of a police raid on an Ottawa journalist's home, which has brought widespread criticism of the new premier and his regime.
"Very clearly, we are not a police state and we have no intention of becoming a police state," Martin said. "Freedom of the press is one of the important pillars underlying our democratic freedoms and I take that very seriously."
At least 10 Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers Wednesday morning raided Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill's home and searched her personal belongings. A similar search was conducted at her newspaper office desk.
The officers carted away files, spiral notebooks and phone books and downloaded O'Neill's computer hard drives in a raid unheard of in a country considered as civilized as Canada.
The Mounties were looking for a lead on the source of a Nov. 8 news story that O'Neill wrote on Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was shipped to his native Syria via Jordan, after he had been detained at Kennedy Airport in New York in September 2002.
The news story had cited a security source and a leaked document saying Arar had allegedly told Syrian intelligence officials during his incarceration that he had attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.
Arar, 33, an Ottawa telecommunications engineer, claims innocence and said he was made to make false confessions during detention and the information leak -- that claimed he had trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan -- had a "devastating effect" on him and his family.
In an unrelated event, Arar has sued top U.S. officials seeking an apology and financial compensation for shipping him to a country where they knew he'd be tortured.
Wednesday's raid on O'Neill's house has shifted the focus from Arar's case to that of the state of freedom of the press in Canada.
"I think this is a black, black day for freedom in this country, and I'm absolutely outraged," said Scott Anderson, editor of the Ottawa Citizen.
"We are seeking answers, and they are using intimidation techniques to try to keep a free press from answering the questions the public has about what can happen to Canadian citizens post-9/11," he said. "I'm outraged," Anderson was quoted by the Toronto Star.
The raid on O'Neill's home "smacks of a police-state mentality," said Gordon Fisher, president of news and information for CanWest Global Communication Corp., owners of the Citizen.
The Star quoted Fisher as saying that the rare move by the Mounties was an act "one might equate with the former Soviet Union rather than a Canadian democracy.
"I believe that the search was carried out in an attempt to intimidate Julie in revealing her source for the news," Drew Gragg, executive editor of The Citizen, told United Press International.
"I don't believe that they were principally interested in laying charges against the reporter but they were looking for source within their own organization," Gragg said in a telephone interview.
Gragg said he was happy that Martin has promised to review some of the draconian laws that were enacted post-Sept. 11, 2001.
Other media organizations too joined in throwing flak at the police raid.
"We have seen one of the most singular threats to the integrity of journalism," Toronto Star Publisher John Honderich said at told a luncheon meeting.
"To think 10 Mounties descended on the home of a journalist in Ottawa ... has a very chilling effect."
Globe and Mail Publisher Phillip Crawley called the raid "deplorable.
"I woke up and ... thought I was in some totalitarian state,'' Crawley said.
The Canadian Association of Journalists too flayed the search.
But the RCMP says it is doing its job.
"It is a criminal investigation and we are attempting to determine all possible sources of the disclosure of classified information and search warrants were executed with that objective in mind," RCMP Staff Sgt. Paul Marsh told UPI.
"While there is no doubt the media fulfill an important function, the police also have an important role to play in a democratic society," Marsh, spokesman of RCMP, said in a telephone interview.
"We are looking at all possible sources of information and evidence in the course of our investigation," Marsh said, adding that the search warrants in question were obtained lawfully through a judicial review and approval process.
Meanwhile, in a rare coincidence, when Mounties were searching O'Neill's home, Ontario Superior Court Judge Mary Lou Benotto Wednesday issued a ruling saying media's constitutionally entrenched right to gather and disseminate information, as well as the public's right to be informed, could be damaged if journalists were forced to give up the identity of their sources.
Benotto quashed a court-issued search warrant and order that required the National Post's editor in chief to surrender a leaked version of a document related to a controversial loan issued by the Business Development Bank of Canada to an inn located in former prime minister Jean Chrétien's riding.
Despite the criticism, as of now the government is determined to find the mole that leaked the information.
"Obviously, given the fact that it was security information made it all the more serious. ... What is of interest, should be of interest to everybody, is who leaked that information, not the journalist that received it," Martin said in Davos.
