The thwarting of an alleged Valentine’s Day massacre in Halifax underlines the fundamental absurdity of Canada’s anti-terror laws.

According to police, three alleged plotters planned to shoot and kill dozens Saturday at a Halifax shopping mall.

Had such a plan succeeded, the effect would have almost certainly been mass terror in the Nova Scotia capital.

Yet Justice Minister Peter MacKay says this was not a terrorist crime. “The attack does not appear to have been culturally motivated, therefore not linked to terrorism,” he told reporters Saturday.

MacKay’s comments caused some puzzlement. Why would the government deem the murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in Ottawa last fall an act of terror, but not this?

In fact, except for his inexplicable use of the word “culturally,” MacKay was technically correct. Canada’s anti-terror laws don’t criminalize actions that might cause terror. Well before the current law was enacted in 2002, it was illegal in Canada to murder people or blow up trains.

Rather, they criminalize intent. It may be illegal to kill people in Canada. But it is even more illegal to kill people for a religious, ideological or political purpose.

What do you think?

More important, it is left to the state to decide — in the first instance at least — which murderous conspiracies have a political motive and which do not.

Thus Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Muslim gunman who killed Cirillo, is deemed a terrorist for the simple reason that the RCMP and government say he was.

Conversely, alleged Halifax plotters Lindsay Souvannarath and Randall Shepherd (the third suspect, James Gamble, died before he could be arrested) are not terrorists because the federal justice minister says they are not.

Had police found Islamic State propaganda on their computers, Souvannarath and Shepherd almost certainly would have been charged with terrorism. But social media sites said to belong to the suspects show an interest only in Nazis and violence.

That, it seems, is insufficiently ideological to merit a terror charge.

So that’s the first point about the terror laws: They are unusually arbitrary.

The second is that the government’s interpretation of these laws is infinitely flexible. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, with the backing of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, proposes a new anti-terror law that would give the security services even more power and citizens even fewer rights.

Critics point out that the government has made no case as to why this Bill C-51 might be necessary. As evidence, they point to the Halifax arrests.

The alleged plot was discovered not by a newly empowered Canadian Security and Intelligence Service bugging email traffic, but by an ordinary citizen who then made an anonymous call to police.

The hapless MacKay was asked about that, too, this weekend. He produced an even more baffling answer.

No, the masterminds of the alleged plot were not terrorists whose capture was hindered by limited CSIS powers. Rather, they were “murderous misfits” apprehended through normal police methods.

Still, he went on, this apparent contradiction proves why stronger anti-terror laws are needed: Run-of-the-mill murderous misfits might, at some unknown point in the future, be attracted to the Islamic State.

Or, to put it another way, the fact that extraordinary security powers were not needed here proves that they are needed.

It is a complicated logic.

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A final point on flexibility. Critics of the new anti-terror bill, including Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, argue that the proposed law is so broad that it would sweep up not just Islamic terrorists but anti-pipeline protestors who use civil disobedience to take on the Conservative government’s economic agenda.

A 2014 RCMP memo obtained by La Presse last week suggests that May is not being paranoid here.

“There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,” the document, which echoes a similar RCMP assessment dated two years earlier, reads.

Radical environmentalists, it seems, are among the real enemies the government plans to crush. Alleged neo-Nazi mass murderers? Fie on them. They’re just random misfits.

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