When PM Pushed the Panic Button, Cheerleader's Mom Pushed Back

Remember all that nonsense from media types following the Parliament Hill shooting about how Canada had "lost its innocence"? Turns out they were right -- just premature.

Canada lost its innocence this week. What was a largely sane nation populated by reasonable, stoic people is slowly vanishing.

Word came out this week that a handful of Saskatchewan high schools cancelled plans to travel to West Edmonton Mall to take part in a cheerleading competition this weekend -- spooked by a threat against the mall in an Al-Shabaab terrorist propaganda video, and subsequently hyped and exploited for political effect by a federal government immune to shame.

When teenagers pass up a road trip to the biggest mall on the continent because they're afraid of Somali terrorists with machetes -- and when their own government does everything in its power to keep them afraid, then the war's over. The function of terrorism is to terrorize. So the terrorists win.

Or maybe not. Thankfully, not all Canadians are as panic-prone as Prime Minister Harper and his skittish minions. Tina Caderna, for one, is having none of it. Her daughter, Trinity, loves cheerleading and wants desperately to compete. So Ms. Caderna is giving those cowardly terrorists, those gutless school boards and fear itself the finger. She's going to drive Trinity to Edmonton from Saskatchewan to cheer, and I dare say, lead.

"This is something that she's been doing for a long time and it wasn't even an option not to go," she told the Canadian Press. "We were going, regardless." Safe travels, Ms. Caderna and good luck, Trinity.

Now, imagine for a moment we had someone with Ms. Caderna's steel calling the shots in Ottawa. Imagine we had a prime minister who had the decency to put the terrorist threat into a real-world context and tell people they don't have to be afraid. Imagine we didn't have a prime minister running around the country like Chicken Little, ginning up the anxiety level and playing the basest form of politics, purely to win an election.

It takes nerve to stare down random violence. Stephen Harper seems to have lost his. He reminds me of Linus from the old Peanuts comic strip, clinging to Bill C-51 like a security blanket to keep the monsters at bay. (Maybe our petrified PM needs to have a long, quiet chat with Lucy when her psychiatric kiosk next opens.)

Uses media

The media share a measure of the blame for this -- for allowing Harper to use them as a megaphone for broadcasting dread. CBC News, in particular, has been a willing and enthusiastic pipeline for Harper's solipsistic brand of fear mongering.

The network has spent goodness knows how much of its modest resources traipsing around the globe, rooting out 150 or so "radicalized" Canadian Muslims, without ever putting that relatively minuscule figure into any kind of responsible context.

Like Harper, CBC correspondent Adrienne Arsenault seems intent on convincing the rest of us blind, complacent rubes that there really are terrorists lurking in the bushes. Arsenault was at it again earlier this week with yet another foreboding documentary with the requisite ominous music, posing this absurd question: Are we safe?

The CBC's jihadist-hunter-in-chief relied almost exclusively on members of Canada's vast security intelligence apparatus for the answer, and quelle surprise, their answer was: Heck no, we're not.

I spent a lot of my career reporting on spies and police, and I've got a tip for Arsenault and the other media alarmists: That's what they'll always say. It's like asking a mechanic if you need new tires.

To buttress her vacuous point, Arsenault shared the findings of an equally hollow CBC-commissioned poll that found that the infinitesimal threat of terrorism keeps "some Canadians awake at night." Among the poll's other findings was this nonsensical observation: more than 50 per cent of Canadians feel "less safe" than they did two years ago. (Less safe how, and why?)

Arsenault tried to explain the "irrational fears" reflected in this much-hyped poll by attributing them to "the outsized damage that radicalization causes." I have no idea what that means, but it sounds pithy.

The irony is overwhelming and, in media circles, largely overlooked. What causes people to "feel less safe" in the absence of any clear evidence that they are less safe? Could it be a wave of hyperbolic reports on vague terrorist threats, coupled with the shameful acts of a government that actually exploits the terrorists' own words for partisan purposes?

Facebook fear mongering

I'm talking, of course, about this nauseating Facebook post brought to you by the fear merchants at Conservative Party HQ. Terrorism is serious business. So is sowing panic.

How far is the Harper government willing to go to profit politically from terrorism? When an Alberta PC MLA and a sitting Conservative MP both describe the message as overkill, it's probably time to dial back the hysteria.

More irony: The intrepid website Press Progress already has pointed out that the Facebook post might have violated Bill C-51 had the bill been in effect this week -- that the Conservative party staffers who used Al-Shabaab's words to scare up votes and campaign funds could have faced jail time for distributing "terrorist propaganda."

On Friday, we all got our first look at a 60-second cell phone video made by Parliament Hill shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shortly before his death. Harper and his cynical entourage of paranoiacs can be expected to appropriate the ramblings of a mentally-ill man to reinforce their global-clash-of-cultures narrative.

It's what they do -- with or without the media's help. But they shouldn't worry. The media will give them all the help they need.