Disaster democracy needs just three things; an atrocious event, a political leader sufficiently cynical not to let any catastrophe go to waste, and a public mindset willing to exchange liberties for the illusion of safety.
The great benefit of disaster democracy is that draws away public attention from matters of the government’s record and redirects it to a more emotional plane. It’s weakness is its limited appeal; disaster democracy only works with frightened populations.
Disaster democracy was on display in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings. Far-right conservative parties went straight to work. Policies sprouted up in the blood of the shootings — from bringing back the death penalty to scapegoating Muslim immigrants — a dangerous hue and cry raised in both France and Britain.
Right-wing leaders outside of France trampled each other in the rush to look tough on terrorism; new anti-terror laws — again. ISIS was a bunch of “porn- watching wankers” as the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson put it — sure to play well with the followers of that lunar-traveller of far-right U.K. politics, Nigel Farage.
Wise leaders don’t build public policy on single events or facile solutions. The Liberals learned that in Canada when they brought in a wildly ill-considered gun registry in reaction to the massacre of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989.
After the biggest mass murder in its history, the shooting of 77 people by right-wing extremist Anders Breivick, the Norwegian government didn’t think it was worth changing their society in the name of a deranged criminal. Not one new law was proclaimed. Somehow Norway has survived. A billion dollars later, the gun registry didn’t.
That is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel eschewed the path chosen by both British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper. In place of knee-jerk and anti-democratic legislation, Merkel said that Germany would take a long, careful look at what happened in Paris, mindful not to further inflame an explosive political landscape for cheap political points.
Great leaders hold their nerve at such moments, taking the time to get it right before profoundly changing their societies. Political bounders immediately pounce on anything at hand to improve their standing — and increase government’s arbitrary power. That is all the more true when these opportunists happen to be facing an election as both Harper and Cameron are.
Bill C-51 is poison for Canadian democracy. For one thing, it undermines the rule of law, suspending basic legal rights and increasing police powers in the shadows without the slightest evidence the changes will make anyone any safer.
No surprise there. After the murders of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in separate incidents, the Harper government immediately increased the authorities’ powers of arrest. It claimed that these tragedies were terrorist-related. No evidence has yet been produced to back up the assertions, including an alleged video of one of the killer’s, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, still being held under wraps by the RCMP, despite promises in the shooting’s aftermath that the video would be released after it had been studied.
Everyone in Canada should look with eyes wide open at any new law which gives CSIS or other federal agencies the right to make disruptive interventions in what they suspect are imminent illegal activities. It has been a long time, nearly 38 years, since the CBC’s Brian Stewart revealed on television that the predecessor of CSIS, the former Security Service of the RCMP, routinely broke the law in the name of national security.
Stewart’s report, backed up by the court testimony of RCMP officers, shocked Canadians. In 1977, the government of Pierre Trudeau put the RCMP on the hot seat of a royal commission presided over by Alberta judge Mr. Justice David McDonald — known still as the McDonald Commission.
Just a few weeks before that, the government of Quebec launched the Keable Commission. Canadians learned that the Security Service was illegally opening mail, conducting multiple break-ins, including at the offices of the Parti Quebecois, to steal membership lists, forging documents, bombing, and conducting illegal wiretaps. The Security Service’s “disruptive actions” included burning a barn in Quebec where it believed members of the FLQ were about to meet with representatives of the Black Panthers movement in the United States.
The targets of illegal police activity, prosaically described as “disruption, coercion, and compromise”, were many and varied. They included nationalist organizations, public sector unions, citizens groups, student organizations, immigrants’ rights groups — not to mention a police file on the personal life of former NDP leader Ed Broadbent.
Any of this sound familiar?
The McDonald Commission on Certain Activities of the RCMP handed a death sentence to the Security Service when it finally reported in 1981. The task of safeguarding national security fell to a new agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. CSIS was to have a clear and focused mandate and Mr. Justice McDonald ruled that the police were required to obey the laws of the land.
Stephen Harper’s latest legislation puts CSIS back in the business of officially sanctioned “dirty tricks”.
It allows authorities to preventive arrests – arrests based on suspicions of what they think someone might do. It makes it a crime to promote terrorism, however that might be interpreted. And it allows the system to detain without charge for seven days, a full four days longer than the current law.
As a veteran observer of the security file told me, “The nation which all those years ago was shocked by the activities of the RCMP Security Service seems to yawn at this proposal.”
Harper is directing CSIS down the same road as rogue intelligence services in the United States and the U.K that have long been on a collision course with democracy. The Canadian government spies on all Canadians through the collection of metadata by the Communications Security Establishment, (CSE) and sends the RCMP to monitor every public demonstration in the land.
The Vancouver Olympic Games and the G20 meetings in Toronto were the objects of a massive RCMP intelligence dragnet completely out of proportion to any perceived threat and in violation of civil liberties. The PM’s obsession with security was reflected in the bill for the G20 and G8 meetings; a billion dollars, or 10 times what any other country had spent on these meetings.
It pays to remember that in Britain, the Government Communications Headquarters, the U.K.’s equivalent to CSE, has even collected the communications of journalists, whom they consider to be a threat to national security. It is also noteworthy that under president George Bush, the National Security Agency was allowed to spy on Americans without warrants issued by the so-called FISA courts — as required by law.
Just because there are rules in place, doesn’t mean the hush-hush boys will play by them. Just consider the lies told by the CIA to Congress about what they really doing to detainees in the war on terror.
It is somehow perfectly fitting that journalists who were corralled in the government lock-up for the unrolling of Bill C-51 got both more and less than what they expected. First, they were not given copies of the bill to read from the outset of the lock-up, the presumable reason the 24 journalists present signed an embargo agreement in the first place. Instead of the bill, they got the bull – all of it from useless officials from the departments of public safety and justice. Then when a copy of the legislation was finally produced, the wireless code promised by the Harper government so that they could file to their newsrooms never materialized.
All of which led the current president of the Press Gallery, Laura Payton, to get out of Dodge and back to the real world.
The finale though was worth waiting for. After the government officials gave up on their disastrous dog and pony show, a massive white screen was lowered from the ceiling, and there, standing between two Canadian flags, six metres tall, was Stephen Harper — Big Brother in all his glory — speaking to adoring crowds in Richmond Hill about evil-doers and other drivel.
Not very many were watching him on Friday, but believe me, he is watching you.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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