A Ban on Racial Profiling in Canada?

Today's Toronto Globe & Mail has a story about Canada's opposition parties, including the Conservatives, called for legislation to ban racial profiling.

Is this a joke? Why on earth are the conservatives supporting this?

I much prefer the term 'profiling'. It is an essential practice that everybody uses to some extent. Basketball teams routinely use height as a profiling tool. Some ethnic groups have higher incidence of mortality form various diseases - prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men.

Would we be upset at a doctor advising extra screening for prostate cancer for a black man? It would surely be profiling...but, I think everybody believes it makes perfect sense.

Michelle Malkin uses the term 'threat profiling'. It makes perfect sense for intelligence gathering at mosques and in the local muslim communities, given the threat from islamic extremists.

At our airports, do we really want equal screening of chinese grandmothers, elderly buddhists, and arab muslims from the middle east? As Malkin say:

"It is unfortunate that loyal Muslims or Arabs might be burdened because of terrorists who share their race, nationality or religion. But any inconvenience is preferable to suffering a second mass terrorist attack on American soil."

Well, apparently, Canadian soil is just OK.