Prime Minister Stephen Harper's inflammatory comments about Iran yesterday are typical of the ultra-rightist claptrap that has marked his party's policy pronouncements since Harper first came to power in 2006.
Only months into his first term Harper scored a major coup in making Canada the first country after Israel to refuse to recognize the elected government in Gaza. The fact that he beat even the Bush administration to the punch remains a source of pride in Conservative circles.
The rabid cheer-leading for the Libyan intervention was an embarrassment to all Canadians who remember a time when we stood for peace-making, not bomb-dropping.
In the summer of 2011 Harper pulled off another glorious triumph, negotiating free trade agreements with two of the most violently anti-labor nations in the Americas, Honduras and Colombia, ranked 117 and 139 respectively on the Global Peace Index.
Having established his cred as a far-right ideologue on the world stage, Harper is now unleashing his bold reactionary vision on Canadians. Bill C-10 is an omnibus crime bill, which promises to "get tough on crime".
Crime stats have been trending lower year after year in Canada, which is an inconvenient fact when you're wanting to build more prisons and hire more police, so the Harperites invented a new category; unreported crime.
This is a new class of crime, obviously beyond the reach of statisticians and criminologists who universally see Bill C-10 as regressive imbecility. Visible only to a small clique of Harper insiders, unreported crime has apparently been skyrocketing. Hence we need to get tough on crime.
C-10 will introduce mandatory minimum prison sentences for a range of non-violent crimes, many of them marijuana related. The already overcrowded prison system will become more overcrowded. Even more young people will be stigmatized by a criminal record that will render them unemployable.
Whereupon their best career option will be growing and trafficking marijuana!
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