Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia Precrime Division, I’m placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin that was to take place today, April 22 at 0800 hours and four minutes.

That’s a quote from the 2002 SF movie, Minority Report, a strange combination of crime thriller and science fiction, where Tom Cruise plays a cop in the “Precrime” unit where people are arrested before they commit a murder. This is only possible because they have three “Precogs” working for them; psychics who can see future murders – but not other crimes apparently, including random acts of murder.

In Canada the future is now, not for murder or any other violent crime but something far worse:

Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already. The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at home, the bill says.

Mr. Virani, who is Attorney-General as well as Justice Minister, said it is important that any peace bond be “calibrated carefully,” saying it would have to meet a high threshold to apply.

Once a system is in place, its “thresholds” and “calibrations” can be adjusted. Remember that all this is coming from the same government that used the existing Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of truckers and other people protesting in 2022 against Canada’s vaccine mandates – and did so illegally:

Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada has accepted the CCF’s [Canadian Constitution Foundation] arguments that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable and violated the Charter rights to expression and security against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Basically the actions were illegal because there were other laws that could have been used against the protesters, not this “law of last resort” and the protestor’s threat did not rise to being “to the security of Canada”.

But who cares? This is long after the damage was done and nobody, least of all PM Trudeau and the rest of his party of human offal, will ever suffer any painful consequences, like having their bank accounts frozen or being thrown in jail themselves. There is some consolation that the trucker protests actually did work.

Meanwhile here in 2024 I can see this proposed law being perverted in the future despite all the following palaver because if they could use the Emergencies Act as they did, they’d have a far easier time screwing these lower-level guardrails:

But [Virani] said the new power, which would require the attorney-general’s approval as well as a judge’s, could prove “very, very important” to restrain the behaviour of someone with a track record of hateful behaviour who may be targeting certain people or groups. If “there’s a genuine fear of an escalation, then an individual or group could come forward and seek a peace bond against them and to prevent them from doing certain things.”

The peace bond could have conditions that include not being close to a synagogue or a mosque, he said. It could also lead to restrictions on internet usage and behaviour. “That would help to deradicalize people who are learning things online and acting out in the real world violently – sometimes fatally.”

The idea used to be that if there were people like this you just let them keep on talking shit until they actually escalated by doing something such as buying a gun and ammo, or chemical fertiliser, which could then be plausibly connected to their speech and writing. Even then I’m probably cutting the scum too much slack, since to me that speech and writing would have to contain clear indications and plans for physically attacking the groups targeted by speech and writing. In other words, direct threats.

And just to show how disgustingly two-faced all this, there’s this piece of news out of that benighted nation:

As reported by blogTO, Toronto Police Service Constable Marco Ricciardi said, “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your [key] fobs at your front door because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”

Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Since obviously even the cops know in advance that these assholes are going to steal your car perhaps we could have a police force that mapped out where the crimes are happening, flood the zone with police officers there to catch them, and then have minimum sentences of jail time for those convicted. Sure, you would not know in advance exactly which car was going to be stolen, but even in Minority Report the cops had some work to do to map the visions to people and places. Pretty soon car thefts would start falling because of the combination of the near certainty of arrest and conviction (and jail time) and the cops could then re-deploy their resources to more serious crime – instead of just giving up in advance on lower priority crimes.

You wouldn’t even need “Precogs”.