The Concealment Of Identity Act, opposed by the Opposition NDP, targets individuals who participate in a “riot” or an “unlawful assembly” while wearing a mask.
Supposedly motivated by events during the G20 in Toronto, the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots and Montreal’s student strike, the law slaps demonstrators who cover their faces with penalties as severe as a 10-year prison sentence.
Frighteningly, while amending the Criminal Code in the name of public safety, it allows the state to determine that a demonstration – a constitutionally protected activity – is itself unlawful.
And without a “lawful excuse” for covering your identifying features, you, and potentially the entire protest of which you’re a part, are done like dinner. Worse still, what constitutes a “lawful excuse” is decided by the boots on the ground: the police.
Already, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is readying for a fight. “We are getting involved in the Montreal constitutional challenge to the masks ban,” says Abby Deshman, director of the CCLA’s public safety program. “We are definitely looking for opportunities to test in the courts exactly what this [law] means and whether it’s constitutional.”
This re-calibration of Canadian justice in further favour of the state certainly feels ominous, especially since police don’t seem to really need it. They certainly weren’t hampered in Vancouver when a drunk, largely suburban rabble with fully visible faces set fire to the downtown, or in Toronto during the G20, when authorities were able to I.D. property-wrecking protesters.
The big irony, of course, is that police themselves use the tactic they seek to criminalize. “We had the largest-ever domestic undercover spy operation,” Deshman says of the G20. “Officers intentionally removed their badges and name tags,” thereby concealing their own identities.
“This issue of who is identifiable to whom, who is accountable to whom really seems to be operating in reverse,” she says. “We need police officers to be identifiable and accountable to the public. The public have the right to express themselves and identify themselves if they want to.”
Though the issue of police failing to I.D. themselves seems not to have occurred to formulators of the law, such incidents are part of a long-running trend. Protesters, for example, outed masked Sûreté du Québec officers at the Montebello protests of 2007, one of whom was holding a rock that demonstrators begged him to put down, all captured in a now iconic video.
Violent police responses to protesters are not isolated, aberrant events; they are part of a creeping erosion of civil liberties. Bill C-309’s strategic endgame isn’t just a crimp in direct action, but the undermining of democracy itself.
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Todd Aalgaard
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