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Canadians will lose more rights and freedom
e-KNOW Editorial
By Ian Cobb
With each new tweak and twist and turn, with every creak of a legislative screw, we lose our rights and freedoms.
Small tweakings in the lengthening Ottawa spring light this past week project additional weight to an already-buckling civil rights aspect of life in our nation.
On the exact same day Mounties, CSIS and the FBI conducted Operation Smooth and prevented the alleged planned derailment of a VIA Rail train in the Toronto area, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and the Conservatives were putting forward proposed amendments to Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act Bill S-7. Sure sounds smooth to me.
Toews wants to resurrect the powers of the Combating Terrorism Act, which in part would give police the power to arrest people without a warrant and force them to speak to the cops – circumventing the good ole ‘you have the right to remain silent.’
How does that sound to you? And what exactly happens next when you opt to remain silent? IT’S A SIGN – A SIGN OF THE DEVIL. PERSECUTE! KILL THE HERETIC!’ Sorry, Monty Python just seems appropriate right now. Actually, they can stuff you in jail for three days.
Naturally, Parliament being Parliament, the opposition parties have tucked into the Conservatives about this attempt to muck about with Canada’s so-called ‘counter-terrorism legislation’ – stating they are using the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent heavy reintroduction of ‘fear of the unknown’ to further their political agenda. It’s easy for them to make such an accusation as that’s exactly how Toews tried to coat his bitter freedom-wounding pill.
Essentially, the opposition knows the Conservatives are up to silly bugger games and once again have the American game players leading them by the large brass hoops through their noses.
Candice Bergen, parliamentary secretary to Toews (no not Murphy Brown), has stated, “We are giving law enforcement the tools that they need, that they’ve asked for.”
Oh Ottawa, you’re protecting us. That’s right, we forgot. Protecting us from threats of terrorism! Ooh… ahh… terror is everywhere!
Terror has been everywhere always. Life on Earth has never known NO TERROR.
It all began when we were shivering in bunches in acacia trees on the African Savannah, terrified of the dark night and the hungry beasts that came with it; it’s marched along with us through the passage of time, part and parcel of the human experience; and it continues today, where we still can’t trust strangers because that’s just foolish. And don’t get me started on spiders!
Do we need to create legislation giving us powers to do what we must to protect ourselves from strangers or spiders, too? Where does this idiocy stop?
Let’s create legislation banning space aliens from landing in Canada, too. They could be a threat… they could be here now… ahhhhh (stay tuned – that scenario will be trotted out one of these days by the American empire as it struggles to keep its slaves tuned to the television and not on what they’re up to.)
What scenarios unfold when police states are allowed to take root? As many as the human imagination can conjure.
Soon we will have to carry our ‘papers’ with us everywhere we go and clear checkpoints in strategic locations, proving we are not transporting terrorists or the seeds of terrorism.
Soon we will all have to check in each night to let the ‘government’ know that we are safe and snug in our bedly-weds, thereby removing us from the immediate ‘terror threat potential’ list, kept up-to-date as our government, along with the US government, have access to all on-line information about us (Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in etc. accounts). Along with the GPS in our cellphones and vehicles, and not too long from now the monitoring implants that our government will force us all to accept, or be branded a ‘terror threat potential’, we will be forever tracked by our ‘government.’
Mass media, suppressed and muzzled and finally purchased into fetid obscurity in the early 21st Century, will publish gripping and stirring stories of ‘near terrorist acts’ and harshly proclaim relief and glee at the fact the perpetrators were killed in capture. But there will be no back-checking of facts – no drilling down into the core of a story and finding the re-bar massing of essential truths, because that is expensive and there are vacuous nothings that need to be publicized – the great barking adventures of complete distraction to a population that can’t watch out where it’s going long enough to stop itself from running proboscis-first into the rapidly approaching double-decker bus of deception and control.
Sigh.
I recently saw a post on Facebook or Twitter that noted “Muslims view “Islamic” terrorists the same way most Christians view the Westboro Baptist Church” out of Kansas – as complete barking lunatics.
Let’s face it, if the majority of Muslims wanted to pick a fight with Christians and Jews and the rest of the world, they’d have gotten busy with that centuries ago. They would have martialed and marched long, long ago.
I’m not saying our society should not be concerned about radical lunatics. Our ever-enlarging world population is naturally going to pump out the requisite, balanced number of nut-jobs, as per genomic capita allows, meaning there will be and are more crazies to keep an eye on.
But before we give our police sweeping and easily misinterpreted powers that disembowel our hard-fought-for and won civil freedoms, we should perhaps properly fund the frigging Mounties accordingly.
Ottawa legendarily cheaps out on our security – whether Liberals or Conservatives in charge – I think it is a secret oath all federally elected officials take when they hover-walk into the sanctified air of Parliament. “I hereby swear to spend foolishly and refuse funding to agencies that really bloody need it and then dump all over said agency when kaka hits the fan. Aegri somnia; descensus in cunicull cavum; hic et nunc; questio quid luris. Pass the trough spoon.”
Canada has also become the most legislatively happy country in the so-called ‘free world’ in the past half a century, because it’s cheaper to make something illegal and dangle that threat over peoples’ heads than to give police the resources to do their jobs properly. They’re pretty good at their jobs, the police. A few more resources would really help them.
But carving into our liberties in the name of battling terror is like having a limb removed for fear the tiny scratch it has received might become infected.
The world has always been a terrifying place. Enacting further legislation in the name of terror is window-dressing to give disturbing and potentially nation-destroying opportunities to terror – because who and what are we really afraid of?
For more on Bill S-7: Combating Terrorism Act – http://openparliament.ca/bills/41-1/S-7/
– Ian Cobb is editor/owner/gerbil wheel oiler of East Kootenay News Online Weekly (e-KNOW).
