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The Conservatives’ attention-getting proposal to ban “terror tourism” is every bit as cunning an election ploy as the New Democrats and the Liberals are saying it is, so let’s grant the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau that much, right off the top. But there are a couple of things that should not go unnoticed about the Tory manoeuvre.

The tack Stephen Harper is taking is not so straightforward as Mulcair claims – a ruse to draw voters’ attention from Conservative economic policies, or from the resumption of proceedings in the trial of Senator Mike Duffy. Nor is it merely another instance of Harper’s Conservatives cynically trampling on the Charter rights of Canadians without even making plain what the point of it would be – which is how Trudeau would want voters to think of it.

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Harper’s proposed prohibition against Canadians traveling to “ground zero” terror badlands anticipates broad exceptions for journalists, diplomats, humanitarian aid workers, and the few brave (although formally discouraged) volunteers with rebel groups arrayed against the variously deranged gotteskriegers that have made life unliveable for so many millions in the so-called Muslim world.