To the Expositor:
I guess we should be grateful for Mr. Brad Middleton’s incisive views (‘A Conservative rebuttal to Chicken-Catch-A-Tory,’ Page 5) on the Canadian political scene in the April 1 (appropriate) edition of the Expositor.
Just to correct a small misconception. Yes, we have had one (count ‘em, one) what could rightly be called terrorist attack on Canadian soil. The other attack on a soldier, in Quebec, was characterized as the action of a random mentally disturbed individual by both the RCMP and the Minister of Justice.
So on the basis of a single sort-of terrorist attack, the Harper regime is turning our entire legislative system upside down and rushing through draconian laws that can have no better effect than to inconvenience millions of Canadians, and at worst will give to the Harper regime the powers to persecute protesters, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, and to arrest and confine without charges anyone seen as an enemy of the state, whether real or illusory or just plain concocted, and to spy on any one of us at any time.
Why couldn’t the Harper regime have merely created one of their famous ‘Actions Plans?’ After all, 1,200 missing and murdered aboriginal women and they respond with an ‘Action Plan.’ One dead soldier and it’s ‘call out the military and send them into Syria’ and create the Arrest and Detain Anyone We Want To Act.
As you well know, Mr. Middleton, Louise Arbour (the lefty) is only one of thousands who have rightly protested the terms of Bill C-51. In fact, 95 percent of those who have testified in the hearings on the bill, including Conservatives, have suggested significant amendments. Now we all know that the Osgoode Hall Law School is an iniquitous den of ‘lefties’ who are bent on making it legal to take from the rich and give to the poor (horrors), unlike the ReformaTories, who prefer to take from the poor and give to the rich (income splitting, anyone?).
One last thing. The militaries of the countries in the Middle East have more than enough soldiers under arms (over 1 million at last count) to take care of the ragtag band of 20,000 or so godless cowards known as ISIS, yet Generalissimo Harper deems it necessary to spend Canadian lives and treasure in pursuit of an unwinable and indefinable goal. At least we, the Allies, can’t win it. All we’re doing is to repeat every mistake of the last few decades, mistakes that have resulted in the mess in which we now find ourselves; fighting yet another foreign war, living in fear, passing untenable laws, hiding in closets. Shiites and Sunnis are just going to have to sort this one out for themselves, because it’s for certain that we can’t do it for them.
Yours truly,
Barry Epstein
Kagawong
