Harper Conservatives promote terrorism in new election ad
A disgraceful attempt to attack Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau yet again shows the questionable judgement of Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. Controversial Bill C-51 has now become law and gives CSIS new powers to spy on individual Canadians and revoke terrorist propaganda. However, the Conservatives have decided in a pre-electoral ad to use ISIS propaganda as a backdrop to smear Trudeau.
The ad pokes fun at Trudeau’s stance to pull out Canada’s CF-18s from a multinational bombing mission that has been proven to be ineffective.
Over 75% of bombers came back without releasing their missiles in fears of harming civilians and the targets have a fairly easy time dodging these airstrikes. Trudeau also said, in an interview on Power and Politics, that he would deploy more troops to train local ground forces to carry out ground-strikes which would ultimately be more effective considering the nature of the mission.
The ad cuts out the scenes where Trudeau explicitly states he would increase local training and also, not surprisingly, cuts out Terry Milewski’s revelations of the ineffectiveness of the bombing mission.
The ad is but a mere fear tactic that stoops to new lows and could be considered illegal under Harper’s own new law. To make matters worse, this ad exploits clear victims of terrorism for political gain.
Bill C-51 grants judges “the power to order the seizure of terrorist propaganda or, if the propaganda is in electronic form, to order the deletion of the propaganda from a computer system.”
Harper continued this crusade in recent campaign speeches where he accused the Liberals and NDP of playing “irresponsible electoral politics” while failing to acknowledge his ad clearly breaks Canada’s new anti-terrorism laws and promotes terrorism.
Trudeau reiterated his position Thursday.
“We just don’t necessarily do it in the way Mr. Harper doing by dropping bombs; there’s much we can do around training and humanitarian support,” he said.
Not only is this ad disgraceful, it should be revoked as part of their own law. They have the nerve to infringe on individual liberties but still hold the audacity to promote terrorism as a means to prop themselves up for an election campaign. It goes on further to show that Bill C-51 was nothing but a wedge to control our private lives.
