-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.3/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.3/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 3</A> The Laissez Faire City Times January 18, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 3 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ----- Tyranny, Canadian Style by Peter Topolewski During one of the events at the 1997 APEC meeting in Vancouver, BC, "protestors" gathered along a procession route to hoist signs decrying then Indonesian leader Suharto�s abuses of power. Publicly displaying disapproval and calling for change is, in Canada, generally considered a right. This particular display, however, Surharto never saw. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrived, under the auspices of removing a security threat, to disperse the protesters. With little warning the RCMP opened up industrial-sized pepper spray canisters on the crowd. Clubs and strip searches followed. Peaceful Canadians exercising their right to free speech: the protestors and the public felt the RCMP treated them with excessive force. After more than 40 public complaints were filed, an inquiry was convened to determine whether the RCMP had acted rightly or wrongly. But the question the RCMP tactics imply, and which is not being officially asked, is did Prime Minister Jean Chretien order the crackdown? Many suspect he did exactly that to fulfill a promise to protect Suharto�s sensitive self esteem. If Chretien ordered the crackdown he explicitly violated Canadian rights and freedoms and his time as PM should be at an end. His government�s tactics during the RCMP inquiry, and the controversy in which the inquiry has been mired since day one, indeed suggest that Chretien was the triggerman. But to this day he looks infallible: arcane procedure, diffuse comments, and a professional aloofness have kept him far removed from, and largely indifferent to, the wrongdoings of APEC 1997. While around the world the Prime Minister�s Office is not generally considered a pinnacle of power, it does by virtue of the structure of Canada�s government enjoy a somewhat unchecked authority. Whereas Clinton may be threatened by Republicans and by his own party for his unholy dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, Chretien announces, and his Liberal party pursues, whatever legislation his Cabinet proposes his party vote for. It�s that--or they�re out in the cold. Chretien is particularly deft letting his Cabinet ministers take total heat for contentious issues and legislation, as though he is the delusional leader mothballed away in the ruler�s palace, oblivious to the underlings� rule. Health Minister Alan Rock has borne the brunt of public outcry over numerous scandals and a tainted blood supply, and Finance Minister Paul Martin continues today to battle fallout from the fudged bookkeeping that has allowed Chretien to claim Canada�s first budget surplus in decades. It is this power system, and Canada�s cryptic procedures of justice, that look to keep the truth of Chretien�s role in APEC �97 hidden, and perhaps the question of his innocence or guilt from even being raised. In this light the PM�s rule in Canada looks like a nightmare of the bureaucratic kind--oppression made civilized. The Inquiry The shenanigans begin with that most Canadian of procedures, the toothless independent public inquiry. It was clear from the start that the whole exercise was half serious and half for show. The inquiry was lead by the RCMP�s Public Complaints Commission: its mandate, to look into the RCMP�s use of force towards protestors at APEC �97. With the PM�s culpability removed at the outset, lawyers, protestors, and the RCMP began the tedious, and for all intents and purposes useless, task of recreating in minutiae for the inquiry panel the events that lead to violent confrontation. From there it got weirder. The pepper spraying took place along a route to an APEC event at the University of British Columbia. UBC is not known for its social activism, but it is a university and the students there managed to muster the requisite protestors to fulfill the idealist image. Early in the inquiry each side debated about the physical details and measurements of the entourage route, the placement of barricades, the off-limits zones, the position of the police, and the placement of anti-Suharto signs. These signs, the RCMP stated without flinching, posed a security threat � how exactly, they never answered satisfactorily; but if justice was to be served, determining the precise location of the signs was of supreme importance. Much hair-splitting, video tape, and crude map-making followed. Not long into the inquiry for truth, however, trouble arose. The students� lawyers told the inquiry panel that they could not continue to work unless they were paid. Students claimed the inquiry was over (and therefore justice denied) if their legal fees were not paid by the government. Typically in such affairs government is the source of legal funding, but Chretien�s government (though not Chretien himself) balked at the students� request. Only one member of Chretien�s government refused to toe the part line on denying funds for student legal fees. For his dissent respected Liberal veteran Ted McWhinney was booted from his House of Commons committee. The students have since gotten by on donations, fundraisers, and charity legal work. Pepper in the Ear Meanwhile, although Chretien was able to keep from being legally implicated, he was not able to keep either his foot out of his mouth or himself out of controversy. When asked to give his thoughts on the use of pepper spray, he jokingly replied," Pepper, I use it on my plate." Later in the House of Commons he was questioned about the RCMP tactics. His answer: what would you prefer, that they use baseball bats? He later followed this up with water cannons. But his gaffs rolled off him like water off a duck�s back. He sounded insensitive, but he dropped the issue and was not further embroiled in the RCMP inquiry. Not until his solicitor general opened his mouth. On board a small commuter plane Solicitor General Andy Scott, the man in charge of the RCMP, suffered a severe case of idiocy. How else to explain his offhand conversation with his friend in the next seat, a conversation in which he stated that one of the senior pepper-spraying RCMP officers would take the fall in the ? Unbeknownst to Scott, NDP Member of Parliament Dick Proctor sat across the aisle. He took nine pages of notes on Scott�s pre-judgement of the inquiry and the next day presented them in the House of Commons. Scott denied all the comments Proctor attributed to him. Outside the House of Commons Scott told reporters he couldn�t even remember if he had been talking to a man or a woman on the plane. Members of Parliament from all non-governing parties called on Chretien to remove Scott from his job. Scott, they said, had sent in the guilty verdict for the RCMP and had done so to protect the PM. For weeks Chretien stood by his Solicitor General, until Scott finally resigned. To the end, Scott maintained his innocence, Absurdist Theater The biggest inquiry in the Public Complaints Commission�s history, and their first on television--the inquiry with a $1 million budget--had become absurdist theater. The students were up in arms. They protested the "so-called inquiry" by posting their obscene musings on it throughout the hearing room. Inquiry panel chairman Gerald Morin didn�t take such lighthearted poking well. He suspended the hearings and threatened to do worse if the immaturity continued. It didn�t, at least from the students� camp. When Morin re-convened the hearings to everyone�s relief, the RCMP lawyers delivered news that they wanted the hearings re-suspended for entirely different reasons. They had an RCMP officer in Saskatchewan (another western province) who had given a statement claiming he�d overheard Morin in a Regina, Saskatchewan casino saying a guilty verdict for the RCMP was as good as done. The rest of the inquiry, it seemed, would be a matter of simply going through the procedural motions. With this news the inquiry was, to no one�s surprise, suspended. An investigation into the allegations against Morin was taken up by the Federal Court. The Public Complaints Commission inquiry went into limbo awaiting the Court�s findings, giving all observers time to take a break and wonder if anyone involved in this public process was clean. Not much time passed before anyone who cared was disappointed again. Gerald Morin, the panel chairman, resigned � but not because of the allegations against him. Rather, he cited constant and pointed interference from Shirley Heafey, chairwoman of the Public Complaints Commission. Of course she was just another link in the chain of command that reached the Solicitor General�s office and ultimately the Prime Minister�s. Shortly after Morin handed in his resignation the other panelists� Vina Starr and John Wright � also stepped down. Inquiry Part One had come to an end, it was time to start all over again. Long before this great public inquiry ended in such a debacle, critics had been calling for a complete judicial inquiry � this apparently being of the variety with an open-ended agenda and the power to do something with its findings, something perhaps more akin to Ken Starr�s hunt for truth. In the aftermath of the disbanded inquiry these calls turned to cries. Not surprisingly Prime Minister Chretien would hear none of it. Chretien and his government have continually thrown their weight behind Heafey's commission, hailing the Public Complaints Commission process � the one which can't address concerns about his office's involvement in the 1997 clashes � as the best way to assess APEC. Enter Ted Hughes So, Shirley Heafy named 71-year-old Ted Hughes, a tough-minded veteran of several public inquiry panels, the new and sole member of the panel investigating the RCMP�s role in APEC. He�s to get started sometime in the early part of this year, though no schedule has been set. Meanwhile, at a Liberal fundraising dinner in Winnipeg (another western Canadian city), Chretien dropped another pepper-spray joke. With anti-APEC protesters raging outside, he ventured a sly aside about westerners serving pepper steaks. Weeks later he visited Vancouver for the first time since APEC for a similar fundraising dinner. He was greeted outside by mobs of, for the most part, peaceful protestors. They were in turn greeted with more RCMP clubbings. "Ted Hughes' reputation" says Norman Ruff, a political scientist at the University of Victoria, "is as someone with the wisdom of Solomon." That wisdom is not likely to be put to use in what is sure to be another sham of an inquiry, whenever he gets it started. Ted Hughes can ask all the questions he wants except the ones the PM won�t let him. 1999 looks to be a busy, if fruitless, year of justice ignored. Chretien will continue his tyrannical ways and, it�s apparent now, his ironical ways as well: this week his government announced a Federal commission has been formed to discover why western Canadians feel so disenfranchised. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 3, Jan. 18, 1999 ----- Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved Disclaimer The Laissez Faire City Times is a private newspaper. 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