Written by: "Anti-Racist" Agitator, Spy and  Informant Matt Lauder

POLICE BECOME GUN TYRANTS

In early May, police in Mississauga seized approximately 3,200 TOY handguns from a local gift shop. The police, justifying their action, publicly stated that the toy guns could easily be confused for real guns.

But, the concern is that the plastic toys are NOT illegal in Canada. That’s right, the police department acted on its own volition and confiscated private property because it wanted to. Totalitarianism is truly here.

Noel Catney, police chief for Peel Region, said that he sought the advice of legal experts and decided that, while the weapons were not illegal, they should be banned. The toy guns were, as Cathney mentioned, in his “view” illegal and should be seized.

Under current legislation, replica firearms are restricted in so far as they are made of wood, metals, or moulded rubber. While the plastic toys that were seized are not, by definition, covered under the legislation, the Peel Region police have decided to take a “zero-tolerance” stand on the issue and confiscate anything it feels breaks the law.

The owners of the gift shop are both surprised and out of money.

Police, who came to the shop a week before the confiscation, had asked the shop-owners to voluntarily take the plastic guns off of the shelves. The shop owners, being good and conscientious citizens, obliged the police request and “immediately took them off the shelves and put them into storage.”

In less than a week, the police returned with a search warrant and seized the items. At present, no charges have been laid against the owners, but the Crown is considering charges of possession and trafficking in a prohibited device.

How far have we come in society when the police enforcers of liberalism feel as though they have the right and power to charge people of an offence that doesn’t really exist? Actions such as these are intolerant and inexcusable and are reminiscent of both communist and fascist actions from the 1920s through 1940s. Do you remember state sponsored book burnings and the secret police that would strike fear in hearts of average citizens?

Canada claims to be the bastion of freedom and democracy the Western world, a community of awareness and tolerance where a variety of ideas and behaviours are accepted. But, where exactly, do these rights for freedom lie? Certainly, when a police agency can enforce fictitious laws, or simply extend the application of an existing law to suit their own political needs, we can safely say that freedom is non-existent.

Government and its related institutions cannot just create or extend laws as its suits them. Such an application of law enforcement powers is simply unconstitutional,

Have all the traditions of this country simply been folded up and pack away?

The use of intrusive measures by the police against Canadian citizens never seems to abate. In May, RCMP investigators took it upon themselves to call student leaders in Newfoundland to find out whether they plan to “embarrass” the prime minister when he visits Memorial University.

Constables from the RCMP called a number of student leaders and asked them if they would agree to an interview. In one case, the RCMP officer wanted to know if students would do anything that could “pose a threat or embarrass” Jean Chretien.

Such behaviour by the RCMP is a clear reminder of the organization’s totalitarian use of force during student led protests at the Asia Pacific Conference at the University of British Columbia more than two years ago. At the conference, the RCMP had used pepper spray to break up an number of protests and were accused of infringing upon the basic human rights of the demonstrators.

The Prime Minister was scheduled to receive a honourary degree from Memorial University on May 24. RCMP officers justified their actions as being proper procedure to secure the safety of the head of state.

Many students who were contacted by the RCMP did not co-operate, arguing that they felt as though they should not have to defend their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech and peaceful assembly.

YES, you are just a number, but also a name with a background; and people in the federal government have been secretly collecting this information on you for over 15 years.

Have you ever worked, applied for social assistance, or completed any form provided by the government? Well, if you have you are now on file in a super-computer database set up by the government to track ordinary, every-day, Canadian citizens.

In mid May, it was revealed that the government currently has a massive database that tracks the lives of ordinary Canadians. Basically, this computer database wasn’t supposed to exists in Canada, not in so far as apparently ‘normal everyday’ people are concerned. In fact, the government has always publicly denied that such a system of collection of information and the existence of a database had ever existed in Canada. But, it does exist and it is clear that the Canadian government actively collects information on its people.

The database, which is controlled by the Department of Human Resources, holds information files on almost every person living in Canada, with as many as approximately 2000 pieces of information on over 33 million people both dead and alive. Statistics such as marital status, education certificates, ethnic origin, mobility, disabilities, income tax, and employment status, to name a few, are all kept on this elaborate system.

In terms of the Canadian government not acknowledging that it knew of the system, it was recently revealed that successive privacy commissioners, who control access and storage of such information through the development of policy, had outright denied its existence. The current privacy commissioner, Bruce Phillips, had recently admitted to the existence of this database in his report to the federal government. His statement simply being that “we were wrong – or not right enough for comfort.”

Sounds like a government cover-up to me. But, then again, they aren’t new are they, and information experts have always suspected the government of the clandestine collection of this type of information for a long time.

The information that is collected and actively used by the government, as identified by HRDC minister Jane Stewart, is collected from income tax returns, child tax benefits, and immigration and social assistance application forms, and employment service records. Stewart, accused recently of departmental mismanagement, maintains that the information is used to develop specialized job training programmes and is closely guarded through the “professionalism” of department personnel.

But the concern is that, regardless of what its intended use is, some person, some where will misuse the information, possibly selling it to private industry for marketing purposes. At least, that’s what most people are afraid of, especially after it was revealed that the Ontario government sold personal information to private industry in the last year.

However, what critics and the people have apparently overlooked is that the government has both lied to people about the existence of such a database and has not truly justified its existence. Sure, it may be for programme development, but what right does the government have to collect the utmost personal information on me? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t.

Such abuse of power by governments is frequent. It is only now that our suspicions of a big brother government, seeking to control every aspect of its people’s lives through the collection and manipulation of information technology, are being proven as true. Aldous Huxley, in his book Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984 were not fantasy; they were simply beyond their time. Finally, the truth of corrupt government under the guise of liberal-democracy is revealed.

The controversy over the super-files seems too much for the federal government to handle. Just this week (May 30), the feds decided that it would “dismantle” the massive tracking system. Since May 29, government officials started to “cut” the links that interconnected the federal departments that maintained the information on ordinary Canadians.

In an apparent about face, Stewart recently claimed that the database was so large that she believed there was “too much information in one spot.”

Since the existence of the government files were revealed, the federal agency overseeing the database had more than 18,000 requests for information access.

The computer database had been in operation for more than 15 years, only coming to light in the last month, reflective a pattern of secretive and highly intrusive actions of modern Canadian government.

But, will the so-called ‘dismantling’ of the super database eliminate this invasion of privacy. Don’t be fooled, the dismantling doesn’t mean elimination, but rather the break-up of information into more manageable units. The collection of private details will, no doubt, continue unabated.