Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Friday, August 03, 2012

Policing the police state iPolitics Insight

Brand-wise, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is like Mickey Mouse: legendary.

When you see Mickey, you’re not supposed to go looking for a mouse-trap. Similarly, the RCMP is not supposed to creep you out.

They are supposed to untie Nell and get her off the tracks before the train cuts her a northern and southern hemisphere, right?

Heck, in the culture at least, the Mounties produced Sergeant Preston, Dudley Do-Right and of course Paul Gross, the constable on the top of every Canadian girl’s wedding cake.

Ride-to-the-rescue men, each and every one. Central-casting men with jaws like Brian Mulroney and girlfriends like Marilyn Monroe.

So why are the lineal descendants of Nelson Eddy creeping me out these days? Could it be because they have exchanged the arm’s length model of doing business with government for the arm-around approach?

Not much has changed since Special Investigator David Brown wrote the RCMP’s epitaph back in 2007 after the demise of former Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli. With smoke still rising above the rubble of the RCMP’s Borgia-bureaucracy, Brown wrote that the Force was “a horribly broken culture.”

Here is further evidence that Humpty-Dumpty has not been put back together again. The RCMP wrote a recent report, now de-classified, warning of a “growing radicalized environmentalist faction” in our midst which is opposed to the government’s energy sector policies.

What a remarkable coincidence. The Mounties are worried about those very same radical environmentalists that Natural Resources minister Joe Oliver says want to use foreign money to hijack hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline. The same ones that the man who is cornering the market on Fossil Awards, Environment Minister Peter Kent, said might be “laundering offshore foreign funds.” No really, David Suzuki is Meyer Lansky with an electron microscope.

And here I thought the RCMP was about enforcing the criminal code in federal matters, not the government’s energy policies. I wonder if this transforms Christy Clark from a poker-playing politician into a radical environmentalist? I wonder if farmers who opposed ditching the Canadian Wheat Board will show up in some future de-classified RCMP threat assessment for opposing government policy? (Never forget, they have combines.) Or maybe there will even be a thick file on poor scribes critical of corporate wars, sleazy politics, suppressing public information, ministerial mendacity and forbidding Canadian public servants and scientists from speaking?

Being an environmentalist is getting to be quite a radical thing under the subfusc dispensation currently ruling the land. But it wasn’t just the Mounties who penned the warning about the people who wear Elizabeth May masks on Earth Day. A lot of other government hands found their way into this particular pot.

The RCMP had help with their report from CSIS, you know, that domestic spy service that somehow found things to do in Afghanistan. And CSIS in turn had help from the Canada Border Service. And the CBS got a leg up from the good people over at Fisheries and Oceans, the ones who just stood silently by as the government scraped the innards out of the Fisheries Act like a fifty-cent fish and closed the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA).

Why, there’s no denying that a whole bunch of Harper agencies put their shoulder to the same wheel in the cause of warning Canadians about the dangerous environmental loons. Did I just say that? Did I just say ‘Harper agencies’?

And isn’t it, well, isn’t it handy that this new menace to federal government policy and Canadian industry has been revealed just in advance of a massive national dogfight over the Northern Gateway Pipeline and other development issues in the far North? You know, forget debating the issue; let’s just agree that anyone who opposes is a bad guy – the for-us or against-us reductio ad absurdum of Witless George?

Starting this parliamentary session, the fur will be flying. It will start when the Harper Government approves the Nexen Deal. It will continue as the PM guides his institutional steamroller over all opposition to the Northern Gateway – a tactic that will inevitably give us a Rocky Mountain Oka standoff among other national shakes and tremors, if an actual earthquake doesn’t steal the show first.

Not that there’s much British Columbia can do about most of the pushing and shoving from Ottawa over Northern Gateway, except just say no, which the provincial NDP are promising to do. The province no longer has any right to impose its own environmental assessment on the project under the terms of a 2010 deal accepting Ottawa’s process. The dumbest thing Christy Clark ever did was to exchange sovereign authority for a pocketful of mumbles known as promises from Ottawa.

And once Northern Gateway is given the high-toned rubber-stamp of “judicious approval” by the National Energy Board (another Harper agency), Enbridge and the Chinese owners of a nice rump of the tar sands will be blinded by the green light from Ottawa. Yes, as the guys who spill oil like kiddies knocking over milk in their high-chairs, Enbridge, for one, will be happy that environmentalists will be portrayed by their own government as quasi-criminals. The golden rule in Harperville? Vilify your opponents, never debate them. The RCMP report even listed the usual crimes of tree-huggers: trespassing, mischief and vandalism.

Now this got me to thinking. We now know what the threat assessment of environmentalists who oppose government policy is. What would a threat assessment of the RCMP look like? What would be on the list of their usual crimes?

I feel like I am about to feed one of the great tv dogs of all time, King, a wooden dog-biscuit, but here goes.

There were all those sled dogs they slaughtered; there was that dynamite they stole and tried to link to the FLQ; there was the membership list of the Parti Québécois they stole during one of 400 illegal break-ins; the infamous barn-burning; they pepper-sprayed Canadian citizens at the Asia Pacific Economic Conference so a dictator like Suharto wouldn’t be discommoded; they pepper-sprayed them again at the Summit of the Americas; they tasered an 82 year-old man in his hospital bed in the name of law and order; their investigators were central in the events leading to the torture of Maher Arar; they rifled their own pension fund; they abused their female members if Catherine Galliford has it right and then dragged their heels on the investigation; Robert Dziekanski didn’t survive his airport encounter with them and then they lied about what had happened; Ian Bush didn’t survive his detachment office encounter with them; they killed Darren Varley.

So the RCMP list of crimes includes gross cruelty to animals; break, enter and theft; framing innocent people; obstruction of justice; arson; assault; elder abuse; aiding and abetting torture; white collar fraud; and manslaughter.

I don’t know about you, but it kind of puts trespassing, mischief, and vandalism into perspective. The RCMP, and the government, want you to see environmentalists as a serious threat to the peace and good order of your universe. As threats go, including to civil liberties, to the rule of law, and even to life and limb, I would submit David Suzuki isn’t the problem.

I would submit the problem is government agencies who are trying so hard to please Dear Leader they are at risk of giving themselves hernias. Take Richard Fadden, the man who always takes the Dracula chair at the barbecue – the one in deepest shadows.

Like the RCMP and its sickening and pro-government indictment of environmentalists, the head of CSIS is a big fan of the Harper government’s attempt to pull the teeth out of one of the last forums for public debate in Canada not poisoned by the alliance between between Big Government and Big Media – the Internet.

The Harper government wanted to allow police, competition bureau officers, and intelligence operatives access to Internet subscriber information – name, address, telephone number, email and IP address, without obtaining a warrant. The head of CSIS liked this idea so much, that he even offered to help re-write the legislation after the PM felt the blowtorch of public opinion scorching his government for this frontal assault against privacy and basic freedoms. Dick, you may be a nice guy, but we don’t need spies drafting our legislation in a free country. Now put down your pen full of invisible ink and read these last few paragraphs.

Next to Christmas, you and people like you have made fear the biggest business in North America.

It has been that way for a decade now – a period of tragic decline for the West by almost any metric – economically, militarily, morally, and psychologically. It is time to give it up. It is time to start celebrating our democracy again, not policing it to death.

A final point on the government’s Internet snooping bill you like so much. When Harper cabinet minister Vic Toews defended this legislation he told a Liberal MP who questioned him that he could either stand with the government or “with the child pornographers.” When Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a new law ushering in online censorship in that country, he justified it by claiming that the first target of the new law was child pornography. You’re a smart guy, Dick, enough said.

As for the RCMP, this postscript: after David Brown reported that the RCMP was horribly broken, the new civilian head of the Force, William Elliott, turned to Professor Linda Duxbury to do another, and perhaps, less damning assessment. It was an Exocet amidships and was never made public as reported by author Paul Palango:

“I can only conclude that the RCMP must undergo fundamental transformational change in order to re-engage its workforce, improve its state of change readiness, and re-establish itself in order to attract the talent it will require in an increasingly complex environment…Changing structures and systems will not suffice…the changes required go much deeper…”

And much, much deeper than carrying water for any government, especially this one.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris

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