Read this article about Canada's G20 political prisoner, Byron Sonne. Now ask yourself if you feel safer that he has been in custody for almost a year. In fact, the whole fiasco makes me even more uneasy because it suggests the security establishment is unable to distinguish real threats from false ones. That scares me because they used Sonne as a way to justify the security theatre by catching someone whether he represented a danger or not.
The more recent charge of "counselling to commit mischief not committed" is equally disturbing because, essentially, it turned the basic freedom of speech into a crime. When this charge was laid earlier this year, this happened in Zimbabwe. If one excludes the torture, which thankfully is not standard procedure in Canada (I'm sure some police wish it was), the rationale of the security forces is disturbingly similar. I did not refer to Sonne as a "political prisoner" for the sake of hyperbole.
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