Canada’s ‘tough on terror’ prime minister wants you to be afraid. He wants you to believe there might be a bogeyman jihadist under your bed. It is the reason for his anti-terrorism Bill C-51 that his majority government forced into law before the election. It is a bad law that supposedly let’s Canada’s security forces look under your bed for you.
And if the news media will just let the Stephen Harper campaign to get back on script, he will tell you all about it. Security is part of Mr. Harper’s spiel for law and order in our generally peaceful land. What he really needs to emphasize his point is to get some Islamic State jihadists over here to run around with guns to scare the populace.
But with the court challenges mounting against the draconian Bill C-51, it looks like more and more Canadians think the bill goes beyond what Canada needs. They have no enthusiasm for allowing or paying for the security forces to look under peoples’ beds.
And paying for increased intrusion on Canadians’ rights and freedoms is the main problem with the bill. It places a great deal more responsibility on the federal police, the security investigation service and the border guardians than they have the personnel or financial resources to handle. They simply cannot do the tasks the bill calls for.
It was obviously in the campaign script for Mr. Harper to start promising specific funding objectives for the security people. This would enable him to show how tough he is on crime. It would also show his Conservative base that he is doing what they want.
Mr. Harper has also been trying to get to his law and order script by pointing to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and blaming them for the refugee crisis in Europe. All we really need to do is bomb the oil fields and pipelines that are bringing those brigands millions of black market oil dollars a day and block their financing from Saudi Arabia to end their involvement. And then all that is needed is for some country to bomb Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to end the war.
But the wiser role for Canada is to stay out of foreign wars that do not involve us. We need to use diplomacy and we need to do a better job of delivering foreign aid. We certainly need to speed up our bringing refugees to safety in our country.
But before we fund Mr. Harper’s Bill C-51 to make sure we are safe in our beds, we should remind Mr. Harper of the words of Justin Trudeau’s father: The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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