He didn’t have to think very hard. Harper’s always seemed almost pathetically eager to turn Canada into a wannabe iteration of the US\u2014 think the dweeby eight-year-old, desperate to emulate his idolized older brother\u2014 and the Patriot Act has, I suspect, always been his Beacon on the Hill (or his Castle Anthrax grail-shaped beacon, depending on your cultural referents).\u00a0 So our beloved leader is once again trying to resurrect all those measures he couldn’t quite sneak into C-52, or C-10, or C-30\u2014 all those measures that no sane citizen would ever oppose, unless of course we chose to “stand with the child pornographers<\/a>“.\u00a0 You know the list<\/a>: lowered evidentiary standards. Increased powers of police surveillance. Increased powers of detention and “preventative arrest”.\u00a0 Increased data sharing with the US.<\/p>\n Basically all that stuff they were doing anyway with impunity, only now more of it will be legal.<\/p>\n But here’s an interesting proposition: new legislation making it illegal to “condone terrorist acts online<\/a>“.\u00a0 The money shot from Ivison’s story:<\/p>\n There is frustration in government \u00a0that the authorities can\u2019t detain or arrest people who express sympathy for atrocities committed overseas \u2026 Sources suggest the government is likely to bring in new hate speech legislation that would make it illegal to claim terrorist acts are justified online.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read that again, just to make sure you’ve got it.\u00a0 We’re not talking about real hate speech here.\u00a0 We’re not talking about advocating genocide, or gay-bashing, or threatening real violence of any type. We’re talking about looking at people the government doesn’t like and saying You know, maybe those people have got a point<\/i>. We’re talking about criminalizing statements like\u2014 oh, for example, “Omar Kadhr was a kid on a battlefield, under attack by the US Military: why wouldn’t <\/i>he fight back?”<\/p>\n And don’t even get me started on what they’d do with this<\/a>.<\/p>\n It would be bad enough if it stopped there. I don’t think it will. Look what happened in the US, once the word “terrorism” acquired its magical power to short-circuit higher brain functions and call down showers of government cash at the invocation of its name. It took about thirty seconds for anything any right-wing nutbar didn’t like to be reclassified as a terrorist act. Here<\/a>, for example, is a piece of US legislation that would literally define taking pictures of animal abuse as an act of terrorism.<\/p>\n Stolen from Dennis Meneses, I think…<\/p><\/div>\n Call it “Terrorist Creep”.<\/p>\n Harper has always taken his lead from his idols to the south\u2014 perhaps that’s why, just a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of bird-watchers got threatened with a tax audit<\/a> after writing a concerned letter on the plight of honeybees affected by government-approved pesticides. \u00a0(Nor is this an isolated incident.\u00a0 Harper’s ideological antipathy to science is notorious around the globe.\u00a0 I’ve heard first-hand accounts of government biologists being reprimanded for using the term “tar sands” instead of “ethical oil” in casual conversation, of field biologists being told there’s no need to monitor wildlife populations this<\/i> year because they already did that last<\/i> year. Just last week the Union of Concerned Scientists\u2014 \u00a0one of the few US organizations Harper does not<\/i> seem eager to emulate\u2014 sent our esteemed PM an open letter<\/a> signed by 800+ scientific professionals, protesting the routine muzzling of Canadian scientists by their own government.)<\/p>\n If it’s an act of terrorism to document instances of industrial animal abuse, what about documenting governmentally-induced disasters from the collapse of Atlantic cod populations to the toxic catastrophe spreading across northern Alberta? \u00a0What about whistleblowing the wholesale spying on Canadian citizens?\u00a0 What about writing a polite letter of concern about colony collapse disorder?<\/p>\n What about just publicly sympathizing<\/i> with the folks who are doing those things?<\/p>\n![\"Stolen](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/canada-these-men.jpg\")
<\/a>