Americans are not actually in any serious danger from terrorists. The threat is tiny compared with the loss of life from, say, drunk drivers. Americans (and increasingly, people in Canada, where I live) live in a constant state of paranoia about terrorist attacks, crime (which criminologists say is *decreasing* here) and so on. The threat to our lives and freedom from out of control police and military authority is much greater than any threat from Al Qaeda. The US, Britain, and of course the former USSR made things waaaay worse in the Middle East than they had to be. Sure Al Qaeda is evil. But that organization is, at least in part, the product of cynical, exploitive and massively violent policies on the part of western powers. Now we Canadians are pulling the same idiotic stunts.

Big government is not the problem, in Canada anyway. Although our government is indeed big, the current government of Canada is ultra-right-wing. They are determined to downsize government and reduce SOME regulation of industry. However, a pro-business (and anti-public-interest) government like Canada's Harper government only favours deregulation if deregulation BENEFITS big business. They are all in favour of increasingly draconian criminal laws, military expenditure, and laws that convert essentially property and civil issues into criminal ones. It does not go too far to suggest that these guys would be thrilled to turn governance of the country over to a few multinational corporations, backed up by a publicly funded quasi-military police force.