Can you hold several thoughts in your head at once? Can you recognize a situation that calls for action on more than one front? In short, can you walk and chew gum at the same time? You can? Oddly, the Harper government seems unable to do so in leading Canada’s response to terrorism. In recent weeks, the prime minister and his team have shown themselves incapable or unwilling to look beyond a condemn-and-punish level of response to terrorist acts, even where other considerations of great importance to sound public policymaking are at stake.

Justin Trudeau’s rash pronouncement on root causes of the Boston Marathon bombings just hours after they occurred gave the prime minister an irresistible opening to score political points against the new Liberal leader. But instead of taking aim at the rashness of Trudeau’s comments, Harper chose a different target: the very notion of a multivalent response to violence. We shouldn’t wonder about terrorism’s root causes, he declared, but “condemn it categorically” and deal with the perpetrators “as harshly as possible.” Then he delivered the memorable warning that “this is not a time to commit sociology” several days later, after would-be train bombers were arrested in Canada. “I don’t think we want to convey any view to the Canadian public,” he said, “other than our utter condemnation of this kind of violence … and our utter determination through our laws and our activities to do everything we can to prevent it and counter it.”

It’s no small matter that for the sake of political gamesmanship our Prime Minister would sneer at the notion of trying to understand how terrorists are made. That effort is something the leaders of the US and the UK evidently find worthwhile. (And thankfully, so do officials in our own government, as the $10 million Kanishka project shows.)

More fundamentally disturbing, however, is what Harper’s words are trying to achieve. His plainly articulated aim is to make Canadians believe that the only legitimate response in face of terrorism is to condemn and punish using state force and sanctions. If any other thoughts about the issue arise, they’re labelled a sign that the horror of terrorism, and the condemn-and-punish imperative, aren’t being taken seriously enough.

That dynamic also underlies the soon-to-be-passed law that will strip citizenship from those accused of terrorism and membership in enemy armed groups. Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney has explained the government’s support for this private member’s bill as resting on the notion that such acts are singular exemplars of disloyalty to Canadian values, through which perpetrators symbolically “sever their ties with Canada.” The only fitting response, he argues, is for Canada to reciprocate by making the estrangement legally official and removing them from our soil.

Many might find that position compelling as an outlet for feelings of anger and betrayal. But a host of other issues are also worth considering—for instance, as Audrey Macklin has recently argued, the reasons for thinking that “stripping a person of citizenship on grounds of alleged misconduct is arbitrary, medieval, and serves no valid purpose.” On her account, the law will single out certain crimes as “un-Canadian” while ignoring countless others that also conflict with our values; it violates liberal democratic principles in granting immigration minister extraordinary powers of sentencing that shouldn’t be held by the executive level of government; and it achieves nothing the criminal justice system isn’t already capable of dealing with.

Should those considerations be brought to mind at the same time as we affirm the desire to punish terrorists? Nope, they’re three thoughts too many, according to the Harper government; retribution alone should govern Canada’s actions on this front.

By contrast, other governments manage to keep a more complex balance of considerations in mind when dealing with the issue. The surviving Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev won’t lose his naturalized U.S. citizenship because the Supreme Court ruled a half-century ago that no actions anyone commits as a U.S. citizen warrant the loss of citizenship. “Safeguarding the rights of each naturalized American,” as Slate explains, “ensures the dignity and rights of all.” It’s a principle the U.S. took to heart after rejecting its own pre-WWII practice of stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens for “thought crimes” such as anarchism, socialism and communism. And it’s a principle that Canada’s government now wants its own citizens to forget.

To be sure, it’s easier on the intellect to go along with the Harper government’s single-minded tough-on-terror approach. Keeping one big scary thing in mind, with the anger, fear and vengeance it inspires, is simple; mixing up those thoughts and feelings with other facts and principles takes effort. But we abandon this effort at our own risk. We risk not holding the Prime Minister accountable for supporting research and interventions into the factors behind terrorism. And we now imminently risk enabling Minister Kenney to violate fundamental safeguards of citizenship in assuming his new citizenship-stripping powers.

If Canadians feel confident in their own abilities to walk and chew gum at the same time, we’d better not let the Harper government convince us that it’s not a talent called for in shaping Canada’s response to terrorism.

Natalie Brender is a freelance journalist. Her column will appear on thestar.com every Monday.

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