Gee Steve, Why Don’t You Just Cede Us To The U.S.?

Everybody thought a police state wasn’t eminent?   It’s not enough to have some minimum wage flunkies gawking at a scan of your birthday suit before you embark on a big airplane, but  now, if Bill C-42, an insidious law Steve just put out before the closing out parliament (How conveeenient!!); the U.S. (ok, to be fair, applicable to any foreign nation) could and would have access to all info about passengers on board commercial flights merely flying above their airspace, without even landing on American soil.  It would mean that if we’re flying to to places like Cuba or France via American airspace, the U.S. would have the right to know every piece of information about all the passengers on board the plane. In addition, the U.S. would have every right to refuse to allow any given passenger on said airplane.  Imagine, you bought your tickets, reserved your hotels, had all the travel itineraries mapped out only to receive the dreaded call that our American friends just don’t feel quite safe with you over 25, 000 feet (or whatever the altitude is) above them. This sounds like a typical tea-bagger catered law.

This new bill flies in the face of our privacy laws in favour of suck up to the U.S.  This seems like a continuation of  the Softwood Lumber debacle when we started losing our sovereignty to the U.S.  Naturally, this takes a grand chunk more of our sovereignty away.

Gee Steve, How far do you wanna suck up to President Obama? Or is it more the tea-bagger hit parade you’re trying to impress, so they would invite you to  play your reindeer games? Either way, I’m not comfortable with this and I seriously doubt many Canadians would be comfortable with this new law neither.

And yes, this is all about the U.S., as this is strictly an American demand. On the Americans are this paranoid. The Europeans don’t seem to like it neither and  hint at putting up a resistence.

“They just opened the door to everybody without even so much as, ‘Hello, why are you doing this?’

“They can harass our airlines, harass our passengers, anything they want to.”

Liberal MP Joe Volpe said in a telephone interview with The Gazette.

“The government doesn’t feel very comfortable about what it is doing,” Volpe said.

“It is trying to put one over on the public away from the scrutiny of the press and the opposition.”

NDP travel critic Dennis Bevington says pretty much the same thing as Volpe (OH NO!! watch the Harpercon cheerleaders cry coalition!!), saying that this bill was presented at “the very last moment” before the June 17 adjournment.

“We’re doing this without understanding what the threat assessment is,” Bevington added from Hay River, N.W.T., in his Western Arctic riding. “There’s no way this is going to get an easy ride.”

Well, I think Steve is very comfortable with what he’s doing. He just hasn’t had time to get his media together to craft the message as to why this is necessary.

I have an idea. The same one I had when the body scans first came in. Stop flying! Boycott it! Only corporations have Steve’s ear.   The  Liberals may be fighting back but I have a feeling, once again, we won’t support them to vote against it (piss poor polling numbers will reflect that yet again, although, folks, that’s going to have to change; you want the opposition to step up to the plate, we have to support them). If we stop flying en mass, airlines as well as other companies in the travel industry will lose big time.  See where this is going, boys n girls?

I know we all like to travel. But we can live without it.   Many of us wanted the G20 to be teleconferenced, we could practise what we preach. If we really cared about the environment, we would leave less of a carbon footprint by not flying.