Emergency Act Inquiry And Police Lies

Media Criticism And Political Analysis

The biggest bias in the media, and therefore in our populace, is not towards the Liberals or the Tories, but it is the deferential way that our “institutions” are given no scrutiny and are given deference. Sometimes, it’s a good thing – I would rather over deference to, say, public health officials than the American alternative, where Fauci is a hate figure of an alarming number of people – but it’s also a very big problem in one respect.

We still trust the police in this country.

And holy fuck do we need to stop.

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This is certainly a column about the Emergencies Act Inquiry, but let’s take a quick detour to notable police fuckups and lies in this country in recent years (off the top of my head, don’t shoot me that I’m forgetting like 50 of them):

·         The G20 Protests in Toronto in 2010

·         The complete indifference from the RCMP to Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women

·         London Police’s complete indifference to Western’s rampant sexual assault problems

·         Toronto Police finally having to admit use of force was disproportionately used on non-white Torontonians despite lying about it for decades

·         Everything to do with Nova Scotia that’s come out since 2020

We know that police forces are incentivized to lie when it comes to inquiries into their behaviour, which is what this Emergencies Act inquiry is de facto. Nobody argues that had the police handled themselves in a better way that the Emergencies Act would have been a moot point, because it is self-evident. What is also self-evident now is that people are lying, and this inquiry just started.

The OPP Commissioner claimed, in two verbal interviews in August, that the Emergencies Act had NOT been the source of their authority to compel the tow trucks that ended up clearing the Convoy. There are three letters, on his letterhead and over his signature, that says that the Emergencies Act was, in fact, the source of the authority. Now, I understand why reporters can’t call it lies, but it’s clear as day to me what this is – a police force who failed covering their ass badly.

Given what came of the allegation that Brenda Lucki “promised” Bill Blair and Justin Trudeau that they would release the make and model of the guns used in NS – the sum of fuck and all, to use the technical terms – you’d think that police would be less breathlessly taken at face value in the reporting of this, right? You’d think, and yet.

The guy who wrote the Ottawa Police’s Threat Assessment wrote in that document that there were protests against “regimes” across the world, a funny word to use when the entire concept of a regime is one where protests aren’t fucking allowed, you fucking crazy person. This same person liked a Facebook post claiming that Pelosi planned January 6th, referred to teachers as Marxists, and endorsed Mark Sutcliffe for Mayor of Ottawa (not, in itself, a crazy or wild thing to do) … on the grounds that inclusivity is bad, an implicit shot at (noted non-binary) Catherine McKenney, a leading voice for Centretown residents and leading progressive in the Mayor’s race.

Trusting the intelligence assessment of the guy who thinks democratically elected governments are regimes and fascist attempts to steal an election are actually left wing false flags is certainly a choice – as is the now-former Police Chief defending him in his testimony today – and it’s a leading cause of the problems. Once they let the Convoy just roll onto Wellington, they were in a hard spot, yes – and it’s probably worth interrogating whether or not the fact the police force was littered with people who shared the politics of the protestors influenced their hands off approach. (Spoiler: if it was Indigenous protesters, they would have been manhandled into submission by Saturday night.)

It was reported in February that part of the Ottawa Police’s problem is they didn’t trust their members – because if they told too many people the plan, it would get back to the Convoyists and their plans would be fucked. We knew very early on that the Convoy was not a cohesive unit, and we knew that attempting to fucking negotiate some backroom deal with them wouldn’t work – hell, a court order didn’t stop the honking, despite Paul Champ’s valiant efforts.

You want the politics of this inquiry? It’s very simple – whatever the official commissioner decides, the public will decide that the EA was used only after complete and utter police failure, and shrug their shoulders at the specifics of whether this met the definitions of the Emergencies Act. Everyone concedes that it needed to end, and the way it ended was with tow trucks being compelled by the Emergencies Act. At the end of the day, that in and of itself is mostly enough to leave the Liberals with at least a draw, in political terms.

What interests me more, and what is driving me fucking crazy (if you couldn’t tell) is the broader question of why we are still so deferential to an institution we know lies more easily than they breathe. Whether it’s the Ottawa Police here or Toronto Police on racism in their policing to the RCMP’s failures across this country, to the way the (British) London police went harder at the women holding a vigil during COVID lockdown for a woman killed by a cop than they wanted to by the cop, to all the examples of police insanity in the US, we know these are fundamentally dishonest institutions.

And yet, what they say is taken at gospel, even when we know they’ve every incentive to lie.

I saw through the Trudeau “scandal” earlier this year precisely because I didn’t just blindly buy the bullshit of a police officer for a force which was more dishonest than I have been drunk at times, but for some reason you had prominent reporters – not even columnists, but reporters – swallowing whole that the Liberals obviously did it. The fact that it was an obvious attempt to deflect from the biggest police failure in at the very least modern Canadian history? Not worth reporting to many.

I am fully aware that media criticism is in some ways the easiest thing to do – what I do on this site is not journalism, it’s commentary. Whatever you think of the quality of the commentary, I am much closer in role to the Daily Show than I am to any actual journalistic output. If you want to dismiss what I’m about to write on that basis, go right ahead, but it doesn’t make it untrue.

The media in this country is not sufficiently willing to say in public what they know to be true, especially when it comes to the police, and the political right. The fact that the Convoy has been whitewashed, when there were people dancing on the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier, pissing on monuments, waving Nazi flags, making their kids hold signs that say Fuck Trudeau … they weren’t good people, I’m really sorry. I don’t really care if you didn’t like COVID restrictions, but the idea that partaking in a movement with these people is okay is a fiction. But it’s one protected by wide amounts of our political class.

Right now, the right wing media is trying to build up a controversy about the costs of being a country – of the Queen’s funeral costs and how much Trudeau and his family cost us in food. You know what they should be offended by? How much in welfare payments and missed tax revenue the Feds and Ontario are going to lose this year because of the Convoy, as businesses and workers suddenly find themselves short because of the weeks they couldn’t be open and couldn’t work. Shockingly, the “economic costs” of the Indigenous blockades in 2020 were all the media focused on then, but occupy our national capital – and my hometown – with bullshit, and we’ll just whitewash it.

The reason I’m so emotional about this is that those people didn’t just hurt people who live in Centretown or work there, but it hurt my city. I’ve never lived downtown, but downtown saved my life many a time in my not very pleasant youth. Downtown was my escape, as I would skip school for a day and watch Parliament in action. I had a rhythm on those days – House proceedings in the morning, lunch in the Byward Market, head to the War Memorial to pay my respects as the grandson of a World War II veteran, and then back to the House. Those maybe 10 blocks represent something more than just some buildings and some monuments – it represented my salvation in so many ways. And they just fucking pissed on it, both figuratively and literally.

And now the police are trying to pretend that they could have fucking solved it without the Emergencies Act if they just had more time.

They’re lying. We know they’re lying. And yet, people still report the lies as truth.

God help us all.