how'd this get away from the subject of 'Voting irregularities'
- Tory crime bill an attack on our liberty
It is said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and that’s just as true now, after the Conservative win, as it was before.
I’m sure that some Tory supporters have been dancing in the streets singing Let Freedom Reign, but putting your faith in any one political party is having blind faith.
The people with the power are the ones we often need to be most afraid of, nameless, faceless bureaucrats with immense power to set regulations that can be impossible to overturn. And since we don’t vote for them, they have no reason to fear us.
Politicians don’t really run the show, they just set some direction and hope the bureaucrats get it right.
We hope our elected officials act as an oversight on our behalf, but we can’t count on it.
If you don’t want intrusive laws creeping up, if you don’t want your liberty eroded, then it’s up to you to stand on guard.
The Conservatives plan on introducing an omnibus crime bill when the House resumes that wraps all of their previous legislation into one.
The bill is promoted as allowing police to track and prosecute the perverts passing around child pornography and allows them to update their monitoring techniques to deal with the ever-changing computerized world we live in.
Sounds fine. What could be wrong with that?
In fact, there’s nothing wrong with that part, but there is plenty to worry about in what they propose to do regarding hate crimes.
The bill plans to make it a crime to link to any website that promotes hatred.
Here’s what the Library of Parliament says about the bill on its website: “Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.”
For simply posting a link to a website that has material someone else deems hateful, you could go to jail for two years and be branded a criminal.
The Internet police. Only in Canada.
This isn’t about protecting people from genocide or even threats of death, the way the law is written now is much broader.
“Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against an identifiable group is guilty.”
There’s also the sticky question of who decides what is hateful?
Will websites promoting Israeli Apartheid Week, now a staple on university campuses across Canada, land someone in jail? What about web postings on the Armenian genocide which the Armenians blame the Turks for but which the Turks dispute?
This is a ridiculous proposal that has no place in a country that claims to cherish freedom of expression.
We used to say: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Now it seems like Canadian society believes “I disapprove of what you say and I’ll prosecute you.”
The Harper Conservatives won a majority Monday, they can pass this bill without relying on any other party for support. But they still need your support and your donations and the Canadian public should tell them they will get neither if they put forward bills like this that attack liberty.
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