"Next time someone threatens to 'move to Canada' over real or imagined Patriot Act overreach, present him with this scenario:

"Having settled into his new Ottawa digs, your expatriate pal is reading his morning paper when a familiar name leaps off the newsprint: his own.

"Turns out Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigators were trolling your friend’s neighborhood for unprotected wireless internet connections, and leached onto his.

"Why? So they could post racist comments under assumed names on 'neo-Nazi hate sites,' then charge the site’s owners with … publishing hate speech.

"That’s how your innocent friend’s name and address got read aloud — then hastily broadcast by Blackberrying bloggers and journalists — in open court, as evidence in one of the CHRC’s most widely publicized cases.

"So now your left-wing expatriate friend is widely suspected of being either a neo-Nazi racist or part of a secret government entrapment scheme.

"His phone starts ringing. It won’t stop for quite some time...

"Kind of a buzzkill after all those (highly exaggerated) reports about 'gay marriage' and 'legalized pot' up here in the Great White North, eh?

"On March 25 there were gasps in an Ottawa hearing room when testimony during Warman vs. Lemire revealed that just such Soviet-flavored tactics were being used during CHRC 'hate speech' investigations..."