"Either stand with us or with the child pornographers."
It takes a certain sort of mind to craft such a ridiculous statement, and to do it with any semblance of sincerity. This is the sort of wild, dangerous muck racking one might expect from a Rush Limbaugh, a Glenn Beck, or an Ezra Levant, all members of the hard right media juggernaut in North America, playing on the murky fears of soccer moms and hard working dads. They terrify their audiences daily with emotional diatribes, littered with language that manipulates the ill informed fears of people who, when all is said and done, just want to live a safe life, raise a family, and pursue the American dream. Even in Canada.
This statement was made by none of the above. No red faced Rush on his radio show, no weeping tea party enthusiast on Fox News, and no tabloid hack from the Toronto Sun, though I'm sure they all approved the use of such an emotionally charged, ludicrous bit of scare bait. No, this statement came straight from the mouth of Canada's Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews.
The remark came during a heated debate Monday in Canada's House of Commons, as they discussed the Conservative government's proposed Bill C-30, an internet surveillance bill that would force internet service providers to turn over personal user information to authorities without a warrant. Toews fired the remark at Liberal Public safety critic Francis Scarpeggia when he dared to question the intrusive powers being proposed. The bill opens the doors for the powers that be to spy on the citizenry, all in the name of public safety.
To keep you safe, governmental authorities need to know what you are doing on-line, whenever they deem it necessary.
The bill is sinister enough based on this alone, but it goes further. Section 17 provides for "exceptional circumstances" under which any police officer can request access to customer information from a telecommunications provider. This section of the bill and its implications came as a shock to Toews himself, who claimed not to know that this provision was couched in the bill. The suggestion that one of the most vocal and aggressive advocates for this legislation doesn't know what it entails leaves much to be desired. If he doesn't know what he's voting for, what hope does the average Canadian have of comprehending what it means?
I have a sneaking suspicion that lack of comprehension is what they were banking on.
The bill's short title, Protecting Children from Internet Predators, lends weight to the idea that the Harper regime intended to use the completely understandable fear of child abuse as a cloak to force through far more pervasive measures of public surveillance. The rhetoric then kicks in that only someone with something to hide would possibly argue against an act designed to protect children from sexual predators. If you oppose the act, you either are one of these predators, or as Toews blatantly argued in the House of Commons, you support them.
This is the stifling of dissent through guilt by association. It's a deceptive trick of language as a weapon that conservatives have become masters at.
In the past it was communists and pinkos. Then hippies and black panthers. In more recent years, islamic fundamentalists. Now, if you don't support the government's need to spy on the populace at will, you might as well be leaving your child's bedroom door open for paedophiles to come and go freely in the dead of night.
If you question this bill, and its potential for gross invasions of privacy at the discretion of government power and police authority, you are endangering children. No one wants to be lumped in with the lowest form of human devilry, unless they have skeletons in their inbox of a similarly dark and twisted nature. This rationale attempts to force our support of legislation like Bill C-30. The fear of being seen as a pariah by association, complicit in the evil crimes of the worst among us -- or worse -- being suspected of those crimes ourselves.
On this occasion, the tactic appears to have failed, at least for now. Toews edged away from his comments during a CBC Radio interview aired on Saturday, claiming them as the result of a heated battle on the Commons floor. The backlash from most public media outlets in Canada, and from the public in the greater on-line forums, shut down the Tories' mad, manipulative rhetoric. The legislation will still go through of course, thanks to Harper's majority in Parliament. It is a bitter sweet victory, and we still end up losing in the end.
But in the least, perhaps it has given them cause to question how effective this old tactic can be in the future. It isn't difficult to understand why governments are attacking the internet, and our ability to use it freely. The web provides us all twenty four hour access to perspectives that in the near past would have just been out of reach. Within moments of such an absurd statement like this being made, thousands of keyboard warriors can flood the super highway with detailed synopses of the real meaning behind the fiery rhetoric, and point out all the devils hiding in the details, covered in the trappings of righteous, moral responsibility.
These days, even soccer moms have friends like me.
