First of all, I am a guest in this land, and I am a non-citizen, non-PR, who has been living here for a decade. I acknowledge that I am in the first place excluded from the consideration and from the conversation by being non-Canadian. At the same time, I'm deeply concerned by this whole issue and I have been following it since I am living here.
I'm also an artist, and I have been prevented from gaining more legal or political ground in this land by being an artist, because that isn't really in line with the economic security that the nation is going for.
A few years ago, I made a piece of artwork focusing on the lone wolf terrorist and also the online predator issues, which I was dealing with after some public shows. Then what happened is, unfortunately, I experienced some incidents that were violating my privacy very profoundly. Then I realized that the existence of this anti-terrorism bill might account for this unexplained act of destruction.
I'm here to talk about the goal of the imagination that is implicated in this law. I have actually become very interested in this issue since then. I saw a video of the Minister of Public Safety talking about the lone wolf terrorist issue, defending against the criticism of Bill C-51. He said the copycat mentality is very dangerous and we have to go to the roots of these people and disrupt them. I couldn't quite grasp what that really meant and it gave me a deep chill actually.
I couldn't stop thinking that it is the law that proves the state's privilege to imagine and to impose the imagined narrative on people at the risk of their actual safety and freedom of mobility and freedom of expression. My biggest concern is that this logic is being normalized and perpetrated while the group of people who are the most vulnerable and unprotected and barred from their legal rights are being kept from and excluded from the issues of the rights and their actual safety as this issue of nationalism is being perpetrated in a binary way, of Canadians and non-Canadians. I'm also speaking on behalf of all the people who are racially discriminated against and who have to go through that in their life. That was my argument.
Also, I recently saw a diagram showing the threat level of terrorism. As many who have spoken previously said, many people do not agree with this law. This diagram was designed for people like me who don't really have enough time to go through the long letters of the laws. It very simply described medium and low and high levels of threats and showed that Canada's threat level was medium. It's almost like this kitchen science logic that is easy for people to understand and keeps trying to convince people who don't really agree with it.
I'm just questioning this normal imagination or convincing process of creating those contents to convince people who are not really agreeing with this law.
Thank you, and thank you for having my voice heard.