MONTREAL—Exhibit A in Stephen Harper’s case for the most comprehensive national security overhaul since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is a recording so short that it is almost a misnomer to call it a video.

At only a bit more than a minute in length in its entirety, the message Michael Zehaf-Bibeau recorded on his cellphone before he killed a soldier at the National War Memorial on the way to a shooting rampage inside the main parliament building last October does little more than clear up the issue of personal motive.

In the 54-second edited version the RCMP released on Friday, Zehaf-Bibeau says he is seeking revenge for Canada’s military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From the RCMP’s perspective, that categorizes the Parliament Hill shooter as a terrorist within the current legal definition of the term.

Fair enough, but does that make the video the smoking gun that the government needs to justify the extraordinary scope of its legislative response to last October’s dramatic events?

That the Parliament Hill shooting was the trigger for a more muscular anti-terror agenda is hardly in question.

No initiative of the magnitude of the bill that is currently before Parliament was on the Conservative radar until the Oct. 22 attack — not even when the prime minister announced that Canada’s military would join the war against Islamic extremists in Iraq just a few days before the Hill shooting.

Harper neither mused about the need to vastly expand the operational scope of Canada’s intelligence services after the so-called Toronto 18 terror group was stopped in its tracks in 2006, nor did he raise that possibility when an alleged terrorist plan to attack Via trains surfaced in 2013.

Yet in both instances there was more evidence of long-planned concerted efforts on the part of more than one individual to inflict serious damage on the country’s infrastructures and institutions.

Had the Zehaf-Bibeau video featured a delusional rant based on some tin-foil-hat theory, it is highly unlikely that Bill C-51 would have seen the light of day.

Instead, minds would have turned to making Parliament Hill less exposed to the unpredictable acts of a deranged mind.

By the same token, such a bill might not have surfaced so quickly had the government — in the absence of a video — had to wait for the RCMP to deliver some comprehensive findings before coming to definitive conclusions at to the legislative way forward.

On that latter score neither the video nor RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson’s latest comments about the ongoing inquiry provide definitive answers.

What the video shows is that Zehaf-Bibeau was calm when he recorded his message. Based on the autopsy report he was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

It is also clear that he believed he was invested with a religious mission.

But it is not because Zehaf-Bibeau latched on Islamist extremism to justify unjustifiable acts to protest Canada’s foreign policy that he was thinking rationally.

For the record, the last time someone engaged in a killing spree inside a Canadian legislature — in Quebec in 1984 — the guilty party also believed he was guided by divine inspiration. He was subsequently found to have significant mental health issues.

More importantly, the Zehaf-Bibeau video — at least in its edited format — provides no clue as to whether the shooting was a solo act orchestrated as part of a larger design or a one-man show.

Paulson says he is convinced Zehab-Bibeau “did not come to this act alone” but he also confirms that on the day of the shooting no accomplice was involved.

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To sum up: the video released on Friday does not, on its own, validate the arguments of those who denounce the measures contained in Bill C-51 as a gross overkill.

But nor does it justify the government’s rush to curtail the privacy rights of all Canadians in the name of a stepped-up war on domestic terrorism.

Notwithstanding the Conservative embrace of the video as the ultimate proof that legislation along the lines of their Bill C-51 is urgently needed, the recording provides more political cover than it does policy rationale for the government’s anti-terror agenda.