Do Canadians Have Any Stake in the Present System?

The Toronto G20 is just one more example of elected representatives betraying the interests of ordinary Canadian citizens.

I’m trying to invent a new word. A word that describes the sensation citizens everywhere experience when they encounter news in the paper, online, or on television. I’m sure you’re familiar with the emotion I’m talking about – the one that accompanies the thought, “predictable but disappointing.” In short, that awful feeling of being betrayed – again – by our elected representatives, as has been the case during the Toronto G20 civil rights debacle.

Things like this happen so often that they have induced a kind of mass cynicism/psychosis. We’ll call it cynisosis. Geez, this word practically invents itself.

Of course, disappointment is by definition something that happens when our expectations are dashed. But you would think our default cynicism would preclude that very sense of disappointment when our politicians, cops, and editorial boards denounce us.

The truth must be that, despite everything, we do hope for better. In fact, we expect better.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, in partnership with the National Union of Public and General Employees, released a report last week entitled “Breach of the Peace.” The report was based on public hearings that took place last November in Toronto and Montreal concerning the Toronto G20.

Late last June, when the G20 was underway, politicians were falling over themselves to proclaim their loyalty to the police. Then candidate now mayor Rob Ford didn’t waste words with his opinion: “I think the police were too nice. I would have had a zero-tolerance approach." A few months later, when the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) reopened an investigation into specific acts of police brutality, Ford – to no one’s surprise – hadn’t changed his tune: "I have very little sympathy for the people who were down there, and I support our police."

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty was somewhat more diplomatic when he said, “Our police –given the circumstances and the challenges that were before them – conducted themselves remarkably well.” Of course, McGuinty and his cabinet laid the legal groundwork for numerous police abuses by secretly cooking up an absurd application of the Public Works Protection Act, using it to close off half of downtown Toronto.

Prime Minister Harper has generally been circumspect in his comments on the matter, but at the time of the summit he did blame the $1 billion security tab on the need to counter “thuggish criminals” – presumably meaning the tiny group of “Black Bloc” anarchists who, completely unimpeded by the police, smashed windows and set aflame abandoned police cars for a couple of hours before disappearing from the area.

When the police finally decided to do something about the Black Bloc protesters, who never numbered more than 100, they attacked peaceable crowds at Queen’s Park and elsewhere, arresting more than 1,100 people. The math is a little strange, don’t you think? Arresting 1,100 to get 100?

If our elected representatives’ reactions at the time seemed dismissive, there was little improvement in what they said in reaction to the CCLA/NUPGE report. Premier McGuinty, like most government officials, sees endless stalling as the answer: “We’ve got five independent reviews taking place now. I think that’s a lot of expertise and independent perspective and I think that’s going to do a really good job.”

The federal government seems to take a similar stance. Speaking for the government, Tory MP Dave MacKenzie – parliamentary secretary to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews – said, “As has been said many times before, we encourage anyone who has a complaint to direct their concerns to the appropriate body.” How helpful.

So despite what tens of thousands of witnesses saw in the streets of Toronto last summer, and despite all the outrageous video footage available online and even broadcast on national television, nearly all of our elected representatives have had little more to say than “Everything is fine, and we support the police.”

This forces me to ask: when are they going to stand up for the citizens and taxpayers? Canadian citizens stood in their own streets, speaking their minds about serious issues. For their participation in civic life, they were subject to outrageous abuses and shocking violations of their civil liberties. Is it truly so hard to publicly express dismay?

We elect our government officials, and then they turn against us. Not only will they not defend our interests against the interests of the powerful, they can’t even stand up for our basic civil liberties. They persist in pretending the police did nothing wrong – that at worst there may have been a few mistakes. When something particularly egregious is revealed on video they concede that maybe there were, in fact, a few bad apples, but that the police otherwise acquitted themselves magnificently.

In a genuine democracy, where the rule of law is supreme and political accountability real, politicians would hang their heads in shame. They would be appalled that ordinary citizens were treated like dirt. They would be concerned that the people’s charter rights vanished like smoke, and they would say as much. The ones responsible for these outrages would resign – or be forced to.

Instead, our elected representatives continue to make a show of praising the armed gang that beat and threatened ordinary citizens. The police violated their charter rights and snickered while doing so, because they knew there would never be a reckoning. A few months later, when called upon to identify officers in a video who viciously beat citizens, the police clammed up.

Contrast the cops’ behaviour with Canadians who simply stood up for a variety of causes that are hardly controversial. In Toronto that weekend, ordinary Canadians marched for women’s rights, for the environment, to end war, to stop cruel exploitation, and for workers’ rights.

If our political masters are concerned about political radicals running wild in the streets, then perhaps they shouldn’t be making it obvious how little regard they have for ordinary citizens. Otherwise, demonstrators who speak out about perfectly legitimate issues might discover that they have no stake at all in the present system, and will by necessity change it – soft methods be damned.