One can only congratulate Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews for taking George W. Bush’s Churchillian call to freedom in 2001 — “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” — and raising him one with Monday’s House of Commons classic, “He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

Toews was speaking of a conscientious Liberal MP who had dared question the Harper government’s new bill allowing free-ranging police online surveillance of Canadians. Francis Scarpaleggia, the Liberal public safety critic, had been doing his job — rather well, in fact — by saying that the bill has police “preparing to read Canadians’ emails and track their movements through cellphone signals, in both cases without a warrant.”

The lovely and fragrant Toews, a towering intellect and rollerblader — I’m only saying this in preparation for my arrest on child porn charges, when I’ll require traction for my abject begging — guards our children with a Tea Party level of threat and thuggery. It’s a move that most politicians would not have dared make. But we have a Conservative majority in this country. This bill will pass. How can it not?

So Toews got carried away. Or did he? The Conservatives are punitive and paranoid. What’s so private that you wouldn’t want the RCMP to see it? Something to hide, buddy?

Bill C-30 includes, as CBC.ca reports online: requiring telecommunications and Internet providers to give up subscriber data, including name, address, mobile phone number and IP address (your online ID). And that’s before they get a warrant.

The bill also forces tech providers to provide police with a “back door” for easy surveillance. It also lets police get warrants to track any information sent online, who sent it and from where, and will let courts force other parties to preserve electronic evidence.

This last one rather sums up the terror of this new law. While we anguish over Facebook and Google’s increasingly blatant use and storage of our online lives, we’re blind to the ultimate destination of this information. It can now go straight to the cop who asks for it. As the NDP’s Charlie Angus put it, it gives the police a licence for fishing expeditions into all “private communications,” the all-inclusive term used in the bill. Cellphones would become an “electronic prisoner’s bracelet,” Angus said.

A smart journalist wouldn’t be writing this column, the very existence of which must lead Toews to conclude that I not only enjoy but probably manufacture child porn in my off-hours to the point that I have already applied for a daycare licence.

The man has already implicitly accused me of this, given that I oppose this grotesque invasion into the privacy of everyone who has ever touched a computer or been in a room where anyone was online to shop/research/waste time or indeed commission the rape of toddlers and masturbate to same.

The target is not just pornographers and buyers. The target is you, because the bill gives police such vast powers that anyone online — or inadvertently linked online or hacked by criminals — could be unfairly caught up in it.

Privacy is freedom’s greatest treasure. I hate intrusion, whether it’s by government or corporations or nosy neighbours. But yes, the long-gun registry seemed a fair trade. A good citizen is willing to let the police know whether he has the capacity to kill a wife or an entire kindergarten class. But the Conservatives claimed to hate the registry because it invaded the privacy of law-abiding people.

They were lying. This government hates privacy. The bill is the most grotesque intrusion into our lives I have seen beyond individual Conservative MPs’ sneaky efforts to intrude into the bodies of young women by banning abortion. Your body isn’t safe. Now nothing will be.

I’m pleased to see that other more conservative journalists are equally opposed to the bill, though the Conservatives may simply assume we’re in the same pedophile ring. The courts will be our only defence against this law.

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Online, people are saying they’re ashamed to be Canadian. I’m not ashamed. I’m frightened.

hmallick@thestar.ca