BIG BROTHER HAS A BRAND NEW WEAPON

Think Hard Before You Send Money To The U.S. To Help Your Relatives

TORONTO - Claiming to be fighting a valiant war on crime, governments
around the world - but especially in Canada - are actually fighting an
escalating war on people.

This includes Ottawa's draconian "money-laundering" regulations. If you
send $15,000 in cash to pay for your grandmother's hip replacement at a
U.S. hospital, your name will go on the list of potential money launderers.
Privacy? Freedom? Guilt? Innocence? Forget it. Under some definition,
sending cash into the U.S. health-care system probably is money laundering.

Another manifestation of Ottawa's war on people at the expense of
individual freedom is Bill C-24, a law to fight organized crime.

Introduced last April, C-24 whipped through final third reading last week,
just before the MP's fled Ottawa with their pockets stuffed with the
proceeds of organized politics.

The new law vastly expands government power and gives police the right to
break the law to enforce the law.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has called parts of the
legislation "evil," but that didn't faze the government. People who tried
to follow C-24 on its rapid run through the Commons say it is as bad in the
final version as it was the day it was introduced.

Provincial and local governments have their own power-expansion ambitions
and are more than ready to hand police fresh authority to stomp on basic
rights.

Ontario last month reintroduced its own infamous organized crime
legislation, noted mostly for giving government the ability to seize the
assets of innocent people if prosecutors think the assets were acquired,
directly or indirectly, through some organized criminal activity.

That these laws go overboard and trample on people's rights nobody
seriously doubts. Oddly, though, it's not until the laws and regulations
are on the books that people begin to realize how much power governments
have taken and how many rights have been lost.

The federal money-laundering law, which sets up a new federal
money-laundering agency to monitor every transaction over $10,000, passed
last year with plenty of warning.

But now that the law in in place, law societies are calling for amendments.

There is also growing recognition the law will do nothing to stop organized
crime.

It's a little late for these concerns. Banks, investment houses and others
are also trying to fight regulations that would imposes massive
paper-pushing and monitoring costs - estimated at up to $100 million - and
turn bankers, lawyers and accountants into government spies on their customers.

It's not a police state yet, but the laws are in place to create one should
anyone get the urge.

The common thread running through these money-laundering and other
anti-crime laws around the world leads straight to Washington and the most
futile crime crusade since Prohibition: the war on drugs.

Hundreds of billions of dollars, global prosecution regimes and
out-of-control police actions are doing little to stop the drug trade. But
they are lining the pockets of bureaucrats and police workers and laying
the groundwork for institutionalized state control.

The international rhetorical campaign against money laundering, organized
crime and so-called "gang" laws, has escalated into what one legal
specialist called a "regulatory jihad."

The objective is to enroll the whole world in the U.S. drug war. The
enrollment technique is to grossly exaggerate the crime.

Ottawa's money-laundering legislation was adopted on the grounds that
somewhere between $5 billion and $17 billion in crime proceeds were being
washed through Canada every year.

Those numbers were concocted by a consultant who defined money laundering
as an "economic crime."

It's a handy catch-all that included insurance fraud ($2.5 billion),
cellular phone fraud ($650 million), stock market fraud ($3 billion) and
telemarketing fraud ($4 billion). Even if these numbers are accurate, and
they look wildly implausible, most of the crimes have nothing to do with
money laundering or the drug industry.

The New Yorker magazine estimated last year that the U.S. government spends
$16 billion US a year on the war on drugs, state and local governments
another $24 billion US. The result is two million people in prison, up
from 750,000 a year ago. But the number of dug addicts has not changed.

Where do Canada's governments get such enthusiasm for joining this absurd
U.S. war - and at such expense to Canadians' rights and protections?

The new laws expand police powers, break down the trust between bankers and
customers, and between lawyers and clients, and give governments new
authority to prosecute and harass innocent people.

The U.S. war on drugs is fast becoming a Canadian war on Canadians.

And we don't even have a drug problem worth worrying about.