Canada is a land of civil liberties in certain respects. But when certain citizens are under constant surveillance one wonders how much liberty we have. Perhaps more are protected than others. Are we being protected by the law or do we have to protect ourselves from the law? At least civil liberties exist on paper and we can choose who can vote for. Ah but if politics remains the same even when I vote for someone different, what kind of choice do I have if democracy is supposed to guarantee me representation according to what we vote for? So is liberal/conservative democracy a myth or a reality?
Maybe it was a reality that has soured. After all you can always demonstrate but that doesn't mean you'll be taken off the streets. We build multi million dollar detention centers for tax credits to show how we are liberally minded towards Canadian citizens whose origins are different from the more accepted Portuguese or Italian. Is that because citizens from those countries are Catholic and not from a minority religions? I wonder if civil liberties really exist but of course, they don't. I could look to Denmark as an example or barometer of the forces working behind liberal movements offering alternative political choices. And when you hear that 300 or 500 people are arrested in a generally avant-garde country like Denmark then you wonder about contrasts. Those are the contrasts denying youth the freedom to express themselves differently.The three detainees at the Kingston penitentiary are in a diplomatic limbo not having access to work there which would make them useful to our society. Neither are they allowed to frequent a library, exercise or see their spouses. And when I hear we offered entry to Iranians to join their family after having lived in a Russian airport for many months because they had falsified passports why can't we offer Canadian citizens a dignified existence when held without clear charges in a maximum security penitentiary. The answer is that we can't as log as certain people in power have an entrenched notion that everyone with the name of Omar is a want to be terrorist and cannot have rights like your average white Protestant or Catholic Canadian.
I don't think officials fear at all the security threat that three Muslim Canadians represent, I think they are just working by example and want to show how much they are in accord with the 1984 politics in practice in the real Guantanamo. This is why we are so busy copying the American way of handling Iraqis or Afghanis.
We all know from the media and literature that the legal process isn't always just! Just look at the "mani puliti" operation (meaning clean hands) which was supposed to uncover underworld dealings between government officials and the mafia in Italy. Di Pietro, who headed the investigation resigned over that situation. Does that mean that the legal process has been carried out successfully? Get it?That country has bills of rights too.In other words we can have all the charter of rights dripping in chocolate, as occurred during a recent protest and there will still be false imprisonment.
We can also have Canadian lawyers defending Canadian tycoons from fraudulent activity as in the case of Konrad Black when we all know that money buys justice and that his smug vendictive look will never be behind bars as long as he has friends in the right places. So what civil liberties do I have as a tax paying citizen to make sure I don't pay taxes for this tycoon's lavish parties and to maintain his expensive spending habits? I don't have any even though he may be sitting in a courtroom with a blue collared jury that may be bought out just as what probably occured in the O.J. Simpson trial where he was released after two murder charges.
What's worse is that we are propagating Bush's paranoia on stopping terrorism at all costs by detaining people illegally while at the same time we send young soldiers to their death half way around the world where the main transport is the donkey or camel. Don't you love the Bush-Harper friendship for that? Well then now you know what you can do with the charter. Paradoxically the greatest threat to our security is ourselves as we undercover our true inhospitality to dual citizens from those countries on the Bush black list. The greatest threat to our security is by our detaining citizens without a fair trial and by including limitations in a charter so that freedoms are revoked whenever Harper wants to show how much he loves Bush's stance.
Recently we hear that we are detaining Afghanis just as our American counterparts are detaining Iraqis. Our defense minister has no knowledge if these people are being tortured or not and has the audacity to suggest the Red Cross should do the checking. It doesn't do us any benefit by duplicating their behavior especially when we see that there is only increasing violence in the US, an increase of violence in schools and an increase in the supposed threat of foreign groups importing nuclear weaponry into the US to destroy American cities. I don't know how much of that information is real and how much is just being fabricated like the procession of a nuclear arsenal which Iraq did not have present when Bush accused that country of building a nuclear threat. It all works well with the entrenched attitude generated by the Bush paranoiac machine using these smaller nations as scapegoats while they occupy their lands and remove their wealth.
