Agreed, definitely in a different league (or, markedly different as I said). The overarching point, which admittedly I didn’t do a great job of sketching out, is that there is a fine line to how far the government reaches in response to such a brazen act. Should be interesting to see how fast/the substance of the new legislation is going to be on this.

Fair points. It was probably imprudent to include the phrase ‘wildly unpopular’, and probably could have done without mention of the Oct Crisis in general. However, I do stand by the statement that invoking the War Measures Act was an unpopular move, but I will concede that I should have stated that it was the policy that was unpopular rather than the man (although we could debate the reasons he stayed in power for 14yrs thereafter).

I guess my overarching point was that there is a fine line to walk in the face of an incident like this. Today we heard Harper say that the legislature will be acting swiftly re: increased powers of surveillance/detention/arrest, and the early money is that it is going to look something like the controversial UK legislation. Should be interesting to see, I think CSIS needs more resources, the RCMP probably needs some more powers on this stuff, but there is considerable room to over do it.