Welcome To Harper's Canada: It's A Police State

Jeepers, as if it wasn't evil enough that this bastard Prime Minister wants to undermine key legal principles such as "Presumption of Innocence" by resurrecting what was bill C-27 as part of Bill C-2, we also find Harper insisting that we need to give police the right to detain without charge, as well as an attempt to resurrect the extra-judicial "Security Certificate" process.

In Harper's Canada, if you aren't a Canadian Citizen, you can be locked up without trial, and without recourse because of what someone whispers you might do. I didn't like the Security Certificate system when I first started hearing about it, and after the royal fuck up that was the Maher Arar case, anything that breaks the fundamental, and essential right to contest your detention before a court of law is just plain wrong in my view.

Similarly, five years after originally providing police with broad powers of both detention and the right to compel suspects to testify in terrorism investigations, we find two basic facts:

1) No terrorism investigation required those powers - including the ones that resulted in arrests.
2) By then it was quite clear that allegations that Canada was a hotbed of "terrorist cells" (coming mostly from hysterical American politicians) were obviously a crock.

The basic observation in that five year period has to be that those extraordinary powers are neither necessary, nor are they particularly useful to the people on the ground doing investigations. The first go-round on those clauses was in the wake of 9/11, and in a manner similar to the October Crisis, some overreaction is understandable - if problematic.

In the (hopefully) more rational light of today, it seems to me that we have little or no reason to renew extraordinary powers in any ongoing manner. Powers to detain without charge, and compelling testimony are abusive of fundamental principles of a civil society and subject to even greater abuse if they are actually exercised.

Harper's latest round of "Gettin' Tough" on things is nothing more than a blatant attack on civil liberty at all levels, and typical of what passes for "thinking" among the Con$ these days is based on blithe assumptions that simply are not borne out by reality.