You can see the Hair savouring the thought. Sitting quietly in the Prime Minister’s Office, he is exhorting, “Terrorists unite, you can only save my job for me.” He is hardly the first imperialist who tried to use the bogeyman enemy to cling to office.
And yet the discomfort grows daily with the Conservative anti-terrorism Bill C-51. Does this flawed legislation have the staying power to influence an October election? Why is the Hair so adamant that no amendments will be made? It is hardly the first bad legislation to be brought before Canada’s Parliament. Citizens will hardly stay awake for a clause by clause discussion and analysis of what the bill contains and, more important, what the bill does not contain.
Is the Hair counting on the world’s terrorist community to keep a regular series of atrocities in the news into the spring and summer? He should realize that these are not the most reliable people. Even if the Boko Haram bunch were plotting another attack on a Nigerian girls’ school today, it would just take a couple of the guys shooting some wild boar yesterday and they will put the raid off to have a pig roast. And the New Caliphate guys in the Levant with their black masks are quickly running out of people to murder on the Internet.
The Hair has to realize that even home-grown crazies are doubly unreliable. You can hardly count on the R.C.M. Police breaking up suspected cells of potential terrorists with anything like the fine timing you need to influence an election.
And who is going to pay for the additional police and CSIS boys and girls to search out and arrest these crazed conservationists who want to block pipelines and save the planet from tar sands exploitation. Paying for the police and government spies is just something else you forgot to include in your fine anti-terrorism bill. Is it like everything else you advertise incessantly on television that you have never done? How about the money you took from the police so that they have a huge backlog of child pornography cases to follow up?
Unless the Hair thinks he can ram this bill through the House and just as quickly through what is left of his Senate, he needs time to bring this bill to fruition. Mind you, just the arguing that is going on now might accomplish his objectives. Maybe he is checking the polls every other day and as soon as it is warm enough in April or May and the polls are positive for him, we can have a federal election then.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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