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Room for another letter. This is a domestic query. “Mr. Jonas, considering you often defend civil liberties, do you like Bill C-51?”

Like? No, sir, I don’t. Do you know anybody who does? There may be a few but they keep very quiet about it. I’ve heard no one defend Bill C-51 on the basis of desirability, only on the basis of necessity. It would make it easier for the police to protect us from terrorists.

The policeman’s lot is not a happy one, as Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out (I think in their 1880s comic opera ThePirates of Penzance) but few societies regard it as their purpose to make police work congenial. The ones that do are called police states, and I’m not keen to model Canada after them.

I don’t like the Harper government’s proposed anti-terrorism bill at all. The only thing I like less than Bill C-51 is terrorism

If we were to enact Bill C-51 as drafted, we’d be taking a big step in that direction, as virtually all voices in the public debate agree. Would it be a necessary step, though? Is it necessary to protect a free society by laws whose provisions offend core principles of free societies? I say no, but this is a question on which eminently decent and intelligent people may disagree.

The terrorists among us don’t come from Mars. Many of them are our acquaintances or neighbours or, indeed, members of our own families. One reason the policeman’s lot is not a happy one is that sometimes he must serve and protect us from ourselves.

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I don’t like the Harper government’s proposed anti-terrorism bill at all. The only thing I like less than Bill C-51 is terrorism. If I thought, as some people do, that the liberal phase of history had ended, and all we can do is to choose among police states, I’d choose the Harper government’s at its worst in preference to Ayatollah Khamenei’s at its best, but I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet. We still have time to take Bill C-51 back to the drawing board.

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