February 21st, 2022, 2:42 pm
Many commenters are understandably ignorant of a significant back story behind the Canadian trucker convoy controversy.
Of course there is an existing body of laws spread over the various government levels – municipal, provincial and federal - to deal with such unlawful behavior. But a form of paralysis seemed to have overtaken significant elements of the front-line security apparatus. In this circumstance, the local and the federal (RCMP) police forces sat on their hands instead of doing their job to maintain public order. This paralysis has been noticeably selective, and the selectivity most unfortunately has a long and pronounced partisan political bent to it that I shall seek to illuminate.
In Canada, protests against logging, mining and fossil fuel companies by environmental, Indian, and BLM activists are typically dealt with quickly and effectively. Yet this protest, one that directly threatened a quarter of Canada’s trade with its largest trading partner, was met with stony silence by the security apparatus, and there are documented cases of cooperation between the convoy protestors and police.
First a passing comment - like other Western democracies, Canada is struggling with infiltration of the security apparatus by elements of white power extremist groups. It seems the primary intent of such extremists is to secure access to large supplies of weapons and ammunition.
Now the back story. Canada’s federal police force – the RCMP, originally formed to move the Indians off the land to make way for European colonizers - has a long and checkered history. It has recently been mired in multiple, large class action lawsuits by former employees. Yet to come are class action lawsuits against the RCMP from Canada’s First Nations peoples – that will cost many billions in damage settlements.
In the late 1970’s, a Liberal federal government called the “Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP”, often referred to as the Commission. The force had been receiving bad publicity about missteps like illegal wiretaps, and had failed miserably to warn of the home-grown terrorist threat to Canada posed by Quebec extremists, the FLQ, who had conducted a terrorist campaign that included kidnappings, bombings, and the murder of a foreign diplomat.
The McDonald Commission tore strips off the RCMP, the biggest being the removal of responsibility for national security from the force with reassignment to a newly created civilian spy agency, CSIS. The RCMP have been overtly hostile to the Canadian Liberal party ever since, and in recent times have become highly selective in enforcing the law, proving remarkably ineffective at times when failure would embarrass the Liberal Party. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you call me out on it I can provide a very large file on the topic – I am working on a co-authored book about partisan criminality in the Canadian RCMP.
So, part of the motivation for the invocation of seemingly drastic public security measures in response to the Canadian trucker convoy is the existence of systemic issues in the security apparatus. In the US the SCOTUS is nakedly partisan, and in Canada the RCMP is dangerously bent and should be immediately disbanded with prejudice.