Can Toronto avoid becoming a police state?

The land of my birth, where I was educated, in whose army I served, has become a police state, abandoning the high-minded principles under which it was founded. It has demolished its once-sacred Constitution and is sponsoring a continental tyranny that may swallow a complicit Stephen Harper government and us with it.

Harper is preparing to sign a pact with the devil in high heels, Hillary Clinton, to open our borders to U.S. and Mexican citizens. Of course we’ll be immediately flooded with Mexicans of all stripes escaping the nightmare that is their nation, if a collection of warlords can be called a nation. While they should be staying there to straighten out their own evil rulers, the culture of corruption, which is all they’ve known, will be imported here. They’ll further drive down Canadian wages as they’ve done in the depression-ravaged U.S., helpful only to the big transnational corporations and a disaster to the rest of us. Because a neocon like Harper favours his corporate masters, ordinary Canadians will be marginalized.

Free trade has been a disaster for Canadians, shipping our jobs abroad and impoverishing our middle class.

The best thing that happened to the elites who were behind the George W. Bush regime was the 9/11 event in New York City. It enabled a doofus puppet to parade around like a general and gave the regime an excuse to strip Americans of their rights.

They worked it in stages so Americans would be slow-boiled like frogs in tepid water over a fire, never aware they’re being cooked. First there was the Shoe Bomber, a dopey character who seemed drugged and out of it vainly trying to set fire to his shoe which we were told contained an explosive. This during the 2001 Christmas period and in the run-up to the Winter Olympic Games.

It would have been pointless for the bomb to have actually gone off because it was likely an excuse to condition us to walking barefoot through airport security. Last Christmas they conditioned us to having our “junk” fondled thanks to the Underwear Bomber, another drugged-looking character who was brought on board without a ticket by a government operative who was spotted doing so by an expert witness in the person of a lawyer and his wife.

It also didn’t go boom, enabling us to learn about this newest threat from bearded men in caves, again thanks to seeming serendipity. So they fondle our junk to keep us safe. Or they assault us with ionizing radiation to see us naked.

What do you think they’ll do this Christmas?

Now they may not have been behind the deadly events at the Twin Towers, but the Republicans and their corporate sponsors surely benefited from those in having the perfect excuse to establish a police state under the pretense of making Americans safer.

Sadly Harper—and likely the Bostonian transplant Michael Ignatieff—would favour this merger of Canada in all but name with the American police state.

Harper did his best to get Canadians inured to tyranny by corruptly placing his summer G20 glory hole in Downtown Toronto, which doesn’t support his reactionary Tories and can be assaulted with political impunity.

They imported cops with no attachment to our city from the hinterlands to bolster the police presence and blocked off a huge patch of Downtown where people live and work and subjected them to being questioned and hassled. Very practical in getting us inured to a surveillance state.

They beat people, kicked people, imprisoned people and hassled people who had done nothing wrong. People who were just there. They declared a “free speech” zone and then beat up and arrested people foolish enough to believe them and go there.

Yet when a band of vandals went down the main street breaking windows and damaging businesses, the police did nothing. They planted a couple of police cars in a crowded area and they were soon set on fire, making the scene look much more riotous than it actually was.

A concentration camp was set up in a film studio and people were dumped in there, many not allowed to use a bathroom, women were denied sanitary napkins, people were deprived of their glasses and medical devices. All this for people who in most instances were just scooped up in what the police call a “kettling” operation. That’s where they surround a group of people who are in the area, push them together and “boil them over” into paddy wagons.

It was the first round in what we fear is a war for our minds, to accustom us to being abused by our own police in preparation for more authoritarianism to come—as has happened in the U.S.

But Toronto residents are not lying down for it. They’ve been aggressive in demanding accountability from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, and from city police chief Bill Blair. It heartens me to see that. It’s a very “American” response for a people purported to have allegiance to an English queen and to being subdued. Maybe Canada can avoid the police-state trap that has imprisoned the land of my birth.