Canada's Downward Moral Trajectory

This is going to be something of a rambling post. (What else is new, 'eh?) I've just got a lot of stuff on my mind.

First of all, I'm reading Rick Hillier's biography A Soldier First. I'm only about one-third of the way through it and he's just been promoted to brigadier-general to take command of the Canadian Forces base at Pettawawa. It's a long way from the stuff on Afghanistan that I signed the book out for. But he has talked about the Somalia scandal, where two CF airborne soldiers tortured a Somali teenager to death and posed with the pictures. I'd like to write a long post about how he handles that, but for now I'd just like to mention how this was a huge public-relations black eye for the CF at the time. Canadians were disgusted with this scandal, and after revelations of racist hazing ceremonies were leaked to the media (if I recall correctly, the black recruit who had "KKK" and "nigger" written on his body said that his comrades weren't racist), the airborne was disbanded and the CF was up for massive budget cuts. Hillier bemoans this whole thing, but all I could think was that after the serial scandals of Afghanistan and practically the whole culture is united in brainless, jingoistic "support the troops" rhetoric or other apathy, that Canada has degraded since the days of the Somalia inquiry.

Speaking of degraded, we have now the spectacle of massive, shameless abuse of a citizens' rights under the Charter in the case of Alex Hundert. As I understand it, the story is this: Hundert belonged to an anti-capitalist group of activists who might have planned to riot at the G20 gathering in Toronto last summer. To prevent this, the police arrested Hundert at gunpoint one morning. Tragically, despite having one of the "ring-leaders" of the anti-G20 organizers and having spent over one-billion fucking dollars on security, with thousands of extra cops on hand, these incompetent shit-heads utterly failed to prevent the window-smashing that was probably going to have been the extent of any violence anyway. The next day, the police made up for their incompetence by arresting hundreds of innocent protesters and bystanders and subjecting them to intolerable physcial assaults and degradations. (That'll teach 'em!)

Sickeningly, the population of Canada is so terrified of the idea of breaking glass, and so apathetic about the destruction of their own rights and so enamoured of authority that they either yawned at this waste of a billion dollars of their own money and these abuses on their fellow citizens or they actually celebrated it.

Sometime after that, the mayhem mastermind Hundert was released from custody on bail, one of his provisions was that he not attend any political demonstrations.



On September 17th, Hundert was re-arrested for violating his bail conditions by participating in a panel discussion ...



... on the G20 at Ryerson University. A justice of the peace (a patronage appointment) agreed that a panel discussion is a "demonstration" and he stayed in jail until he was presented with new, stricter bail conditions:

1: non-association with individuals such as Harsha Walia and Dan Keller and groups such as AW@L and No One Is Illegal; 2: no planning and or participating/planning public meetings or marches and 3: no expressing political views in public, including in the media.

Obviously, this blanket restriction on the right to express political views in public is a clear violation of his Charter rights. Hundert initially refused these conditions until (according to the intertubes) the security director at the Toronto East Detention Centre threatened him with indefinite solitary confinement until the date of his trial and refused him access to a lawyer while indulging in this naked abuse of power.

Bail conditions are used to ensure that an accused person does not have an opportunity to re-offend, that is, to break the law. They're also to prevent the accused from fleeing. Hundert's expression of his political views was not the "crime" he was arrested for. He was arrested for conspiring to cause a disturbance. There's no way that this is justifiable in any court.

I don't know what shit-head dreamed up these idiotic bail conditions, but I'll be donating to the legal fund for the appeal against them (because the legal system can redeem itself the same way one judge redeemed it in his public spanking of the racist harpercons and their treatment of Abousfian Abdelrazik) so again, I'll be donating:

Please contribute to the legal defence fund. Ways to donate:

1) Transfer funds to:
OPIRG York
transit number 00646
institution number 842
account number 3542240
Use your online bank account or contact your bank directly to transfer funds. Please put "G20 legal defence" in the memo.

2) Write a cheque
Cheques (payable to 'Toronto Community Mobilization Network' OR OPIRG York, with 'G20 legal defence' on the subject line) can be mailed to:
Toronto Community Mobilization Network
360A Bloor Street W
PO Box 68557
Toronto, ON M5S 1X0

3) Donate by PayPal
Make sure to put 'G20 legal defence' in the "Add special instructions for the Merchant" section. Donation link is above

Of course, this abuse of power was made much easier by precdents as the Supreme Court ruling saying that Canadians don't have the right to have lawyers present during police interrogations. Hundert had asked to see a lawyer and was denied. All part and parcel of the right-wing belief that accused people have no rights.

Can we hold our breath though that a legal challenge can improve Hundert's situation? Sadly, another bad precedent was set by the Supreme Court's refusal to enforce Omar Khadr's Charter rights. In their January, 2010 ruling, the justices ruled that, yes, by not demanding that the USA respect Khadr's human rights and even going so far as to interrogate him themselves while he was subject to illegal detention and abuse, Canadian officials had violated Khadr's rights, but they didn't bother to force the government to actually do anything to rectify the situation. (Some have argued that the Court was respecting the prerogatives of the separate branches of government but this is hogwash. In the Abdelrazik ruling the Judge ordered the government to begin getting Abdelrazik back within 15 days. The Supreme Court could have ordered the government to rectify Khadr's situation within a specific period of time, but instead they said, "You're violating the Constitution. Could you eventually get around to doing something about that please?" Still, in violations of citizens' rights so blatant that even asshole hypocrites like Mark Steyn are appalled, there's hope.

On a somewhat lighter note, not the worst offender, but the most ridiculous. Constable Adam Josephs, who received international humiliation for his steroid-induced rage which he directed at a young woman blowing bubbles at the G20, is tired of weeping in his impotence at the YouTube cartoon inspired by his stupidity and is deciding to sue YouTube for $1.2 million. In so doing, Josephs is displaying the typical whining, pathetic stupidity of bullies everywhere. ("Consequences for my actions? WTF???? It's so unfair!!! Boo-hoo-hoo!") Other outrages, much worse, were done by police and other security on that weekend, blatant violations of the rights of hundreds of innocent people. But this has been building for a long time. The most glaring, public case being the impunity with which four RCMP constables (Constable Kwesi Millington, Constable Gerry Rundel, Constable Bill Bentley, Corporal Monty Robinson, killed Robert Dziekanski and lied about it.

Where are we going? Well, take the latest economic catastrophe, ... the crisis of profitability has gotten worse since it first arose in the early-1970s. The capitalist system responded to that crisis with three strategies, liberalization, globalization, and financialization, all of which were short-term solutions that ended up only exacerbating the problem. This is because capitalist is not sustainable as a system.

It's quite clear that things are going to get worse, and the system's elites are going to have to work harder to both maintain their levels of affluence AND suppress the anger that arises as the masses see their living standards continue to deteriorate. People are angry. People are going to protest. The job (as the elites see it) is to encourage anger and protest into unproductive dead-ends, where the largest groups from among the majority can blame weaker demographics for their predicament and to attack the government policies and non-government organizations that exist to mitigate the damages of capitalism and defend the rights of the ordinary person.

Case in point: The lavish media attention towards the deluded "Tea Party" movement in the USA. These poor lost souls are angry at Wall Street bail-outs, unemployment, immigrants, gay rights, free trade, ... that is, they are angry about some of the things we on the left are angry about, but also many things that really have nothing to do with the problems we face at all, unless it is to make those problems less. The reason these people gravitate towards astro-turf shams like the Tea Party is because their analysis are flawed, either due to stupidity or to ignorance and disinformation. But they will be held up as examples of the only respectable form of protest and will be used to ensure that any political rebellions against a decaying system are steered towards useless right-wing alternatives (such as happened with the PAN in Mexico taking over from the six-decade ruling PRI following the catastrophes of NAFTA).

This is why the Globe & Mail has decided to refurbish its image as a right-wing garbage paper, firing its regular lefty columnist Rick Salutin and replacing her with war-on-terror cheerleader Irshad Manji and running "vital" features about whether multiculturalism is a mistake. It's why drooling morons like Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford are paraded around as if their credible political thinkers and his supporters aren't lamentably ignorant tools. The Globe is doing its part to service the elite agenda of making sure that thinking in this country gets directed along the same blind alleys as it is in the USA, and the Rob Ford candidacy is representative of the efforts to make justifiable mass anger flows along counterproductive lines that only destabilize efforts to keep society from going straight downhill.