Harper Picks And Chooses What Canadian Rights He’s Willing To Stand Up For

A Brief Comment by Doug Draper

Canada’s Conservative/Reform Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper has once again shown us what Canadian rights he thinks should be respected by police and which ones shouldn’t.

Canada’s top sheriff Stephen Harper throws his RCMP posse under the wagon wheels in cheap bid to please gun owners

In a statement Canada’s answer to the American Tea Party released this past Friday, June 28, Harper criticized officers for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for removing easy to locate guns from homes abandoned by people during the recent tragic flooding in the Calgary, Alberta area, and he exhorted the officers to return these guns to their owners “as soon as possible.” 

“We (meaning Harper and his larger contingent of trained party seals, I guess) believe the RCMP  should focus on more important tasks such as protecting lives and private property,” the statement from the prime minister’s office said. 

Contrast this with Harper’s reaction to actions taken by members of police forces across Canada, including the RCMP, three years ago this June when the G-20 Summit was held in Toronto, and more than 1,000 Canadian citizens, including some of the greater Niagara area, were arrested and detained for a day or more without any charges ever being laid, and in what Ontario’s Ombudsman Andre Marin later described as time where Canada’s respect for civil liberties gave way to martial law.

About the only summary response Harper had at the time was that all of that police action, costing Canadian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and far more than has been spent at previous G-20 summits in other countries, was necessary to go after “thugs.” Only problem was that, by almost all reports, the police didn’t do a very good job of going after the thugs, which amounted to a few hundred hooded ‘Black Block’ anarchists that smashed retail store windows and burned police cruisers. Instead it was used to sweep up unarmed citizens attending speeches and other rallies held near Queen’s Park and outside the fences around the summit site.

But then when it comes to RCMP officers picking up guns in abandoned homes in the Calgary area flood zone this late June, that is all of a sudden a violation of rights for the Harper and his fellow neo-cons. 

Never mind that the police were reportedly taking these guns away to storage, with every intention of returning them to their rightful owners, in order to keep them from possibly being stolen by looters. Gee, I thought Harper and his crew, including his tough-talking justice minister and Niagara Falls MP Rob Nicholson, wanted to keep guns out of the hands of criminals?

And never mind that Alberta’s Conservative government premier, Alison Redford, who might otherwise agree with Harper on any one of a number of other issues, stood behind the RCMP actions.

“Let’s just make it very clear — the provincial government did not take away anyone’s guns,” she said at an event in Calgary,” Redford was quoted saying during a media briefing.

“The RCMP went in and secured a community that has been evacuated and as part of that work … they went into houses where there were firearms that weren’t properly secured. And as opposed to leaving them sitting on fireplace mantles in a town that has been evacuated, they secured those guns, There was no suggestion that people will not be able to have their guns back again. I really hope that we can focus on more important matters at hand, like getting 12,000 people back into High River.”

Harper was engaging in crass politics that should be so naked to even his strongest reporters that I need not outline it further. But I will do it anyway.

While Harper refused to express any concern over police actions at the G-20 summit for fear it might, for the more extreme right-wingers in his base make him look ‘soft on crime,’ in this more recent case he is pandering to the more militant gun owners in his camp, even if it means publicly criticizing police for doing something that is arguably responsible to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Harper has gone so far as to publicly criticize police forces to score cheap political points with that element of the gun culture that has bought into the NRA-type propaganda that government officers are coming in black helicopters to confiscate everyone’s’ guns.

One can only hope that many Canadians will see through this Tea Party-like politics and will pledge to defeat the Harper government in the next federal election.

For further information on the tramping of citizen rights during the G-20 Summit in Toronto three years ago this June, visit http://www.ombudsman.on.ca .

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