“This will make you cry.” When people email or tweet links with this sentence attached — it happens to me almost daily — how do you react? Do you sob? Really?

I do not cry to order. I don’t do cheap sentiment, I do not slurp, I merely wish to be of practical assistance. “How do you feel about that?” is an acceptable question but it doesn’t trump a more important one, “What do you think about that?” After the Newtown massacre of tiny children, I didn’t send a teddy bear — the town received 62,780 of them— but instead wrote a column on gun control which was equally useless but is it my fault Americans love their guns?

Google has been trumpeting its Reunion video about two childhood playmates linking up as old men thanks to a granddaughter using Google Search. According to people who like this sort of thing, it is “healing hearts” all over the world, especially in India and Pakistan, which somehow I doubt because Partition in 1947 was a blood zone.

“If you watch it at work, you will cry at your desk unless you are completely made of stone,” a smart writer friend wrote on Facebook, a website so soaked in tears it leaves brine on your fingers. She was double-dog-daring me not to cry. I was impressed — she has made me laugh out loud at my desk, which is a much tougher deal — so I tried.

I scrunched my face up, stuck a carpet tack in my thumb and watched Bobby Deerfield very fast in my head.

It’s a 1977 movie about a racing car driver played by Al Pacino who falls in love with a dying European played by the gorgeous German actress Marthe Keller. He crashes his car during an existential crisis typified by off-track rabbits distracting him during a race. Pacino and Keller flit around Paris flinging baguettes (the main signifier of foreignness in that era; now it’s just glowering) and taking trains enigmatically.

It’s very deep. I have seen it, oh, 82 times and she dies in the end, every single time. I choke and heave like my dishwasher drain.

But I did that thing women shouldn’t do, showed it to my boyfriend, a Brit, as a test of emotional suitability.

Keller had a heavy accent. “A wacing car?” she said to Pacino. “Wabbits? You are not weady to spend a weekend in the countwy with me, Deerfeel.”

My boyfriend did an actual ROTFL, falling on the floor and weeping with laughter. I was furious, although I did marry him. He also married me. To this day he can still rake old wounds by saying “Wabbits?”

Brits don’t do sentiment, and I get that. There is nothing they can’t turn into a gag.

When you give me an object of alleged sentiment, I look at its flat surface and start hunting around its edges for escape. For example, the new Tory cyberbullying bill uses our massive grief surrounding the suicides of teenagers Amanda Todd and Rehtaeh Parsons to push through an omnibus bill that hugely intrudes on Canadians’ online privacy.

Stephen Harper is doing a Vic Toews. Are you with the child pornographers? Do you want teenagers to kill themselves? He is using the beauty and youth of victims as a skin shield for government surveillance. Voters are harried people easily distraught at the sight of those who died unnaturally early, and in that emotional state they are easier to manipulate.

Hard cases make bad law. I applaud Bill C-48, allowing judges in cases of multiple murder to impose a life sentence plus more sentences of parole ineligibility. Concurrent sentencing seemed to suggest murderers were getting three victims for the price of one.

But the Tories named Bill C-48 “Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murderers Act,” which was over the top, as is the “Protecting Canadians from Online Crime” bill. For who could oppose that? Only heartless louts.

It’s a call to anti-digital nostalgia. Awww, cops hugging Canadians? I’m for that.

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Legislation calling out to feelings over intellect is a shameful bargain based on wabbity romance and tender tears. It makes me want to cry.

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