It certainly is being conflated now, especially if you look at Canada's anti-terrorism legislation. Property damage that is political in nature and might be done by a group like Greenpeace or Earth First! counts as terrorism, because it is being done ostensibly to coerce a civilian population or to make a government make a decision.
The main problem with that is that there are social costs, but it's also not the most effective way to allocate resources. If you're focused on stopping the kind of terrorism in which people are killed, then adding this other area of law enforcement under the heading of terrorism means that in addition to wasting resources, you're using the resources you have to combat property destruction poorly, because you are alienating groups you could be working with.
There's a moral or a social question about whether or not property destruction should be counted as terrorism. More practically, though, it's just not a great way of stopping either the kind of terrorism in which people die or the property-damage style of terrorism.