2015 ELECTION #2: SECURITY

VANCOUVER, BC

15 March 2015

2015 ELECTION #2

The sound of the campaign drum began when two demented souls shot two soldiers last fall and we heard about Harper’s keen interest in our safety for the first time. Security is overtaking the economy in his platform.

Like George Bush Jr and 11 September 2001, ‘a situation’ fell into Harper’s lap. The October 2014 murders of Canadian soldier in Ottawa and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu by mentally ill young men trying to find a place in an unfortunate make-believe despotic bootcamp, was his pretext to taking an unwilling country to war. The heretofore vanilla Prime Minister talked excitedly of providing security with the statement: “The biggest job of government is to ensure the safety of its people.” He was planning retaliation and he was ensuring a return volley by ISIS or ISIL. Harper immediately put us in new and much more imminent danger from these young misfits.

Then he introduced the Expanded Surveillance Bill C-51. A juvenile response by a grown man who has a responsibility to make the right decisions on behalf of his people, not an open invitation to an extreme foreign culture with violent insurrection on its mind to anyone who crosses its sword. And Harper has done just that. We are now wide open to any other misguided groupie taking dictation from a religious fanatic utterly mad with power.

With this majority, there is little the opposition can do with a prime minister with the obstinacy and blind fervour of a bull in heat, and until a case reaches the Supreme Court—our effective opposition—the Bill will go swiftly through the warped process extant.

If mad with power is the threat from ISIS, then mad with power is also the threat from Harper as the megalomania that drives him now comes directly from the ease with which he has pushed omnibus bills through the House and into law, and that extends to Bill C-51. With it, the country is now not safe from itself. Completely uncontrolled, any constabulary collecting megadata can force their way into your personal affairs probably causing life changing events such as losing your job, your family, your home, purely by way of implication.

Think about it: one of the few liberal democracies left in the world literally having its constitutional rights and freedoms hanging in the balance. We have allowed a radically different politico to wrench us out of our entire history of stable, balanced governance for the good of all to the antithesis: for the good of a few and fear for the vast majority. We are now being governed by fear!

Like Bush et al, Harper can’t seem to learn, even from in-your-face experience, that violence begets violence.

For a government claiming the most and the best of everything in our history, the country is less secure than ever before in its history.