By Kimball Cariou
As the global debate over the Charlie Hebdo killings descends into chest‑thumping and finger‑pointing, Canadians are being treated to the latest round of arguments over how to “defend our values.” For me personally, the term “Canadian values” brings to mind maple syrup, three‑down football, Hockey Night in Punjabi, the lyrics to “I’se the b’y that builds the boat”, sugar‑dipped fried bannock, and similar cultural constructs found only within the borders of Canada. But perhaps this simply reflects my own family and geographic background.
On the political level, the debate revolves around “protecting our cherished freedoms,” and other noble‑sounding phrases. Some argue that in these perilous times, we must keep a close eye on potential suicide bombers of a certain… well, let’s be polite and not mention the characteristics shared by these wannabe terrorists, but we all know what we’re talking about, nudge nudge, wink wink. Other more liberal‑minded folks are shocked by such talk. After all, Canada is the great land of multiculturalism, the destiny all people facing persecution; surely to engage in racial or religious profiling is to violate this sacred tradition. Well, they admit, perhaps its OK a little bit, if we establish proper “safeguards” and “sunset clauses” to avoid “going overboard”.
And so, the stage is set for political drama as Parliament reconvenes. Mr. Harper’s Conservatives have pledged to expand police and spy agency powers, wth explicit legislation to permit so‑called “preventive arrests”. They will speak as though this is a sad necessity in the face of the “war against western values” waged by the so‑called jihadists. The opposition parties will generally agree about the threat, while warning about the need to be “careful”. Perhaps Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair will even speak in vague terms about the tense international climate of wars and inequality, while carefully avoiding any reference to “root causes” of violence, since of course this phrase is deliberately misinterpreted by the Conservatives and the mass media to mean knee‑jerk wooly‑minded approval of any horrific massacre committed by the “enemies of liberty.”
Unfortunately, the underlying assumptions which frame such debates are badly flawed. Most notably, the idea that Canada has always been a country based on protection of civil rights and democratic freedoms is quite contrary to historical reality. From this false starting point, the entire discussion is warped into fantasy land.
In fact, the “preventive arrest” concept echoes doctrines used to criminalize entire sections of the population during previous periods of colonization, war and turmoil. Each time, the underlying strategy has been to justify suspending civil liberties and democracy to allow collective punishment of groups said to ‘threaten our Canadian values.”
Early in Canada’s colonial history and again after 1867, the targets were Aboriginal peoples who inconveniently insisted that they were the true owners of their historic landbase. Treaties, reservations and residential schools were imposed to put an end to such “barbaric” notions by means of genocide. A similar fate befell the Métis people, twice driven off their lands after confronting the expansionist Canadian state in 1871 and 1885.
But other groups were also targetted at times, especially immigrants like Irish Catholics who were considered insufficiently loyal to the British Crown (imagine that!). Then other immigrants failed to pass the “keep Canada white” skin colour test ‑ notably the Chinese, Japanese and south Asian migrant workers who began arriving on the west coast in large numbers in the late 19th century. Racist “collective punishment ” was quickly meted out to these groups, in the form of Vancouver’s anti‑Asian riots of 1907, the discriminatory “continuous voyage” law which effectively limited the arrivals of south Asians, bans on family reunification, removal of voting rights, etc.
Other European immigrants also faced collective punishment. By the late 1800s, having exhausted the supply of farmers from the British Isles to populate the prairies stolen from the indigenous peoples and Métis, the Canadian state enticed hundreds of thousands from central and eastern Europe with promises of free land. Imagine the horror of the Anglophile Canadian ruling class when war broke out in 1914, pitting the mother country against “the Hun” ‑ Germany and its allies. The colonial mentality assumed that recent immigrants from countries now at war with England would be loyal to their homelands rather than to Canada. Another “problem” was the lack of enthusiasm among Francophones for the prospect of dying on the battlefields of Europe for the interests of the British Crown, which had after all conquered Quebec. As the slaughter decimated warring armies, one solution was to impose forced conscription on the white working class of Canada.
But another strategy was the War Measures Act, a federal statute adopted by Parliament in 1914, to maintain “security and order”. The War Measures Act gave sweeping emergency powers to the federal Cabinet, allowing it to govern by decree when it perceived the existence of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended.” During the First World War, the Act was used to imprison Canadians of German, Ukrainian and Slavic descent, i.e. perceived traitor populations. It was next in force from 1939 to 1942, to imprison Japanese Canadians and confiscate their properties, outlaw the Communist Party and 15 other organizations, and to jail over 250 communist and trade union leaders. The Act was dusted off again during the “October Crisis” of 1970, when a state of “apprehended insurrection” was declared to exist in Quebec, in response to two kidnappings by the Front de Liberation du Québec. More than 450 people were arrested, including hundreds of left‑wing and labour activists with no connections to the FLQ; most were later released without any charges. But it took until 1988 to repeal the War Measures Act, which was replaced by the Emergencies Act, giving more limited and specific security powers to the federal government.
There isn’t enough space here to go into the resurgence of racism and Islamophobia which followed the 9‑11 attacks in the USA, except to note that from that time, Muslims and Arabs in Canada have been treated with grave suspicion, i.e. as “potential terrorists” subject to police monitoring of their organizations, much closer inspection at airports, etc.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, the threat to allow “preventive arrests” escalates the very real tradition of racist scapegoating to a new and dangerous level. And it revives a very old, well‑established “Canadian value” ‑ the belief that certain arbitrarily chosen sections of the population are by definition not truly Canadian. That was the accusation levelled under the War Measures Act against people of German, Austrian, Ukrainian, Japanese and other national origins, as well as against many who were openly critical of corporations and governments. In none of these cases was there ever any proven attempt to attack the Canadian state. Similarly today, random violent acts by a tiny handful of individuals do not translate into any threat requiring governments to scrap democratic rights and civil liberties.
In fact, it could well be argued that one genuine Canadian value is the tradition of resisting arbitrary state attacks on the right to express dissent. That’s a tradition which is well worth keeping alive in these dangerous and confusing times.
Kimball Cariou is the editor of Peoples Voice newspaper