httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIza1amabkA

This ridiculous artifact is so not-Canadian that it would be laughably dismissible except for the very real intimidation tactics it reveals.  The message to Canadians in this and a whole string of other commercials is fear, fear, fear and still more fear.

Anyone living in Canada will know that the Harper government has deployed a battery of government funded television ads to tenderize the public for an upcoming election.  The ads have an unmistakable common theme: national emergency preparedness, kids taking drugs, elder abuse, victims’ rights — and, of course, bringing it all together, the military interception of a ship whose cargo is drugs: drugs that would otherwise be fed to our children and escalate crime (including attacks upon the elderly) to national emergency levels.

This not-so-subliminal advertising is particularly distasteful coming from a government that set the stage for unprovoked police violence against its own citizens last June.

It isn’t that the issues represented in these ads are not important — they most certainly are — but they are exaggerated, de-contextualized, and unrelenting.  They represent the only message this government wishes to relay to the public it is supposed to serve.

It’s ugly.  And it’s an abuse of the public trust to use tax dollars to promote propaganda calculated to demoralize citizens rather than enlighten them.

Here’s the whole lot.  Imagine being subjected to them around the clock every day.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcXhEd_mDt4

Amy Miller describes her incarceration, which included threats of rape by police at last June’s G20 summit.

Let’s call it what it is, shall we?  How else to characterize a regime that budgeted a billion dollars to hire goons who brutalized and unlawfully detained hundreds of Canadian citizens?  According to The Globe and Mail, 10,000 uniformed police were involved, as well as 1,000 “private security.”  Private security? Private security forces were unleashed on citizens exercising their constitutional right to free and peaceful assembly?  Under what laws was this private security operating?  Was it private security operatives or publicly accountable peace officers who were responsible for attacks on citizens?  Who provided this private security?  How much was this private security paid?  What is the liability of this private security for any mischief, damage and harm it might have caused?  This is why we need a public inquiry.

Catherine Porter has a report today in The Toronto Star.

A sample:

Sean Salvati was the 10th person to slip behind the skirted table Thursday afternoon. He looked like a guy’s guy — jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt, short brown hair. He’s 32 and works as a paralegal.

He went to a Blue Jays game with four buddies three nights before the G20 summit. On his way out, he passed two police officers. He wished them good luck on Saturday, before hopping into a cab.

The cab made it two blocks before he was “pulled forcefully” out by the same officers and asked about his “suspicious comment.”

After an hour-long interrogation by a growing number of officers, he was arrested for “being intoxicated in a public place.” He’d drunk 31/2 beers over the course of the ball game.

At the station, Salvati said he was violently strip-searched — “they kicked me in the knees, kneed me in the torso, slapped me in the face, dragged me along the floor until my pants and underwear were removed” — and left naked in a holding cell for four hours. He was never permitted to speak to a lawyer. Upon his release, he asked the sergeant for the name of the officers who interviewed him.

“I was told nobody came to interview me. I imagined the entire interview,” he said.

You can find coverage (including video) of the G20 violence by police in posts from last June 28 – 30.  (Click on the archive link for June 2010 in the right hand menu column.)

(Thanks to Ross Belot for the tip)

This is welcome news.  Last June 28th – 30th we covered the police assaults on peaceful demonstrators after allowing “Black Bloc” vandals to run amok in downtown Toronto for ninety minutes. We also drew attention to the fact that the police have a recent history in Canada of planting agents provocateurs during political summits to foment violence and provoke police action.

The Harper government spent nearly a billion dollars on security for the summit — security which evidently failed and resulted only in the arrest of hundreds of innocent citizens, the largest mass arrest in Canadian history.

A billion dollars.  Compare that to what the Brits paid for the G20 security in London in April 2009 — $28 million — and the Americans in Pittsburgh in September 2009 — $12 million.  Okay, so rounding that out, the Harper government spent $900 million more than the Brit and American summits combined.

Where did the money go?  Who received it?  And why was so much of it needed?

Frye on police power:

But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. (Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 [November 1949]: 170)

(Thanks to Ross Belot for the tip)