A Modest Opinion – You’re going to jail . . . because maybe you might do something, possibly

By Nathaniel Moher

In “This isn’t news” news, the Conservatives recently pushed through a bill that nobody else wanted. That’s the beauty of our system — a Prime Minister can be held in contempt of Parliament, for the first time in the history of Canada, and not only be re-elected but given a majority. Yay, us.

In any event, the Conservatives used the Boston bombings as an excuse to fast-track a couple of “anti-terrorism” laws. Because, you know, they can. (Sure, the Liberals voted in favour too, but that was just to prove that Justin isn’t a nancy-boy.)

One of the laws is a “preventative detention” law, which means you can be held in custody for up to three days without any charges being laid, just because they think you might be thinking about being a terrorist. After those three days, you might be on probation for up to a year — or if you refuse, you get to go to jail for a year!

At first, like most of you, I thought this was crazy! You can’t just lock someone up because you think, maybe, they’re thinking about doing something bad. But then I got to thinking (which might be against the law), what if they actually had thought of doing something bad? I know that I do everything I think about doing.

That’s right, like everybody in the world, everything I think about doing, I do. For instance, I thought about writing this article and then I did it. What more proof do you need?

I’m sure a lot of you went to bed last night thinking, “You know what? I am going to get up early and work out before I start my day.” And, of course, because you thought about doing it, you did it.

So I say, good work Harps! I think (therefore it’s going to happen) that if the government thinks that you’re thinking about doing something bad, we should just lock you up and throw away the key, no questions asked.

I mean, why do we need to ask questions, we already think you’re a bad guy, therefore you are a bad guy.

It’s like the old saying “You think . . . therefore you’re a terrorist.”

But why stop there? I mean, listen, sure it’s great that if we think someone is a bad guy we can lock them up. But what if they just look like a bad guy — shouldn’t we be able to lock those guys up too? (And don’t go thinking I mean anything racist here, I’m just saying maybe they have shifty eyes . . . or are from the Middle East — hey, there’s white people from the Middle East too, you racist you.)

We shouldn’t have to go as far as having to think that maybe they’re thinking about doing something bad. If we look at them and know they’re going to do something bad, let’s just lock them up.

But why stop there? Now this is going to sound pretty extreme, but we’re talking about the safety of our citizens here — why not just lock everyone up?

Wait, you’re right, that is too crazy. What was I thinking?! We can’t lock everyone up . . . because who are we protecting then? So, let’s just lock up anyone who isn’t, say, part of the one percent.

Think about it, once we lock up 99 percent of the population in prisons (without laying charges), we won’t have to worry about bad guys at all . . . because all the bad guys will be locked up (along with the other 98.9 percent of the population, who we just think are bad guys).

It’ll finally be safe to walk the streets at night, you know, because no one will be on them.

Look. I, like most Canadians, hate how different we are from the U.S., with our freedoms and things, so I’m just glad to see that the Harps is taking the right steps toward getting rid of those.

We can only hope that soon they’ll get rid of the pesky universal health care we all hate so much.

Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.