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With his rookie year throne speech clocking in at just 1,750 words, it’s clear that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted to get his slim blueprint for government read and done with as fast as possible. Brief as it was, it got a lot of buzz (visionary! ambitious!) from the more easily-impressed members of the pundit chorus.

The rest of us spent Friday sifting through the bromides for some evidence of a plan. Those of us who worry, for example, about Trudeau’s murky designs for Stephen Harper’s signature “anti-terror” law, C-51, had to make do with this tripe: “Recognizing that Canada is, fundamentally, a safe and peaceful country, the Government will continue to work to keep all Canadians safe, while at the same time protecting our cherished rights and freedoms.”

Isn’t it reassuring to hear that Trudeau plans to keep us “safe” while “protecting” the rights and freedoms that an overwhelming number of civil libertarians, academics and lawyers believe this police-state law pulverizes into extinction?

Look, if Trudeau truly wanted to use simple, clear language to offer Canadians some long-overdue information about the fate of this ghastly law, all he had to do was add five words to the speech, bringing the total up to 1,755: The Government will repeal C-51. Why didn’t he?

If the Liberals intended to repeal C-51, they would have said so. If they’d intended to repeal large parts of the law, they would have sent some signals by now. If they haven’t, common sense suggests it’s because Trudeau has chosen to leave C-51 largely intact. And the strongest indication yet that C-51 is going to emerge relatively unscathed from Trudeau’s first year in power is his cockeyed decision to keep on ex-CSIS director Richard Fadden as his national security adviser.

You may recall that when Fadden was Harper’s national security adviser not so long ago, he gave a haughty, condescending performance before a Senate committee considering C-51, dismissing the law’s many critics as know-nothing fear merchants in need of a chill pill. Don’t get your shorts in a knot, he told the senators — assuring them that nothing bad could happen to civil liberties in this country as long as he and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney were keeping the spies in check.

Trudeau’s failure to add even a sentence to the throne speech signalling any intent to amend C-51 isn’t just mildly surprising. It’s instructive. Trudeau’s failure to add even a sentence to the throne speech signalling any intent to amend C-51 isn’t just mildly surprising. It’s instructive.

“(The bill) seems more frightening than it really is,” Fadden said late last April. “If I think there is real problem, I have access to the prime minister and ministers.”

Fadden’s message was “trust me” then, and it’s “trust me” now. Now, Trudeau has to be numbered among the powerful politicians who actually trust Fadden to police the espionage service he once ran. New government, same old platitudes.

Still, Trudeau’s failure to add even a sentence to the throne speech signalling any intent to amend C-51 — as he insisted he would do before and during the last election campaign — isn’t just mildly surprising. It’s instructive.

Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale have had lots of time to digest a law that will do little, if anything, to prevent either the coordinated terrorist attacks that have repeatedly scarred Paris, Beirut and London, or “lone wolf” attacks of the type that hit San Bernardino last week.

Terrorism cannot be bombed or legislated out of existence. Bill C-51 and laws like it offer the gullible only the illusion of security. And they do so at a terrible cost to free societies. C-51 includes extremely dangerous language criminalizing the “promotion” of terrorism and the spread of terrorist “propaganda” — legal catch-alls that can’t help but erode the right to free speech.

It vastly expands the power of security services to make arrests without warrants, on suspicion. It targets things like interference with “critical infrastructure” (code for protesters messing with pipelines), gives CSIS the power to “disrupt” suspected terrorist plots without waiting around for the cops, and allows it to petition a judge for permission to violate the Charter of Rights.

This isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. The tired strategy of granting security services more powers in the immediate wake of the latest terrorist attack has been tried time and again, and has failed time and again.

Acknowledging this fact doesn’t amount to being “soft on terror,” nor does it constitute “appeasement” of terrorists. Trudeau and Goodale must stop paying attention to the terror hawks and their empty, bumper-sticker rhetoric. They need to start thinking seriously about what causes radicalization, and to adopt tangible strategies to stop it from happening.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims enlisted the support of the RCMP to do precisely that. Their work over 14 months was published last September in the handbook United Against Terrorism: A Collaborative Effort Towards a Secure, Inclusive and Just Canada.

But the Mounties, citing the booklet’s supposed “adversarial tone,” backed out of a joint press conference with the NCCM to unveil the booklet at the last moment. It’s not hard to guess the name of the short-sighted cretin who told the RCMP to publicly disavow an anti-radicalization booklet they were intimately involved in preparing.

Thankfully, you-know-who is gone now. Trudeau and Goodale should instruct RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson to disavow his disavowal of the NCCM and get back to the serious, necessary business of working with the leadership of this country’s Muslim community to prevent others from being enlisted into the ranks of a ‘death cult’ like ISIS.

In the meantime, Trudeau has to stop playing this irresponsible game of hide-and-seek with the future of C-51 and finally listen to the scores of wise people who have shown us — clause by dangerous clause — why this law needs to follow its architect into oblivion.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.