Report by Lyle Stewart
http://www.labournet.net/world/0102/ftaa2.html
Published: 12/02/01
On Rue St. Jean in Quebec City on Sunday (4 Feb), three young people were arrested by two plainclothes officers of the Surete Municipale. Their apparent crime? Handing out pamphlets denouncing threats to our freedom of speech and the unprecedented attack on civil liberties represented by the 5-kilometre security perimetre being set up for the Summit of the Americas this April.
The Quebec police and Mayor Jean-Paul L'Allier hastened to apologize and explain away the "error" after the affair hit the cityÕs newspapers. In no way, they said, did they intend to limit the three young activists' right to freedom of expression. The two officers simply misunderstood a municipal bylaw.
You'll have to excuse my skepticism. The incident is one small part of an escalating pattern of intimidation and harassment of activists planning to demonstrate opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which is to be the subject of closed-door negotiations at the Quebec City summit.
In any case, the pamphlet affair is far from isolated. On Jan. 23, Quebec police officers confronted members of the coalition Operation Quebec Printemps 2001 while they were passing out the very same pamphlet in the city's Place d"Youville. In a bizarre bit of legal reasoning, the officers told the activists that any group of people numbering more than two would be subject to arrest for unlawful assembly.
This paper broke the news Jan. 18 that Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents have been paying visits to activists caught up in the MUC policeÕs mass arrests of demonstrators at the G20 meeting outside the Sheraton hotel last October. Though they have yet to be convicted of any crime (most of the 50 arrested are awaiting trial on the catch-all charge of unlawful assembly, which is being challenged as unconstitutional by lawyer Julius Grey), CSIS obviously considers their activism to be a security threat. Indeed, it said as much in a report on the anti-globalization movement released last summer. In this case, the spy agency refused to confirm or deny the visits, but I've spoken to one activist who tape-recorded his interview with the two agents who visited him at his doorstep.
The RCMP is getting into the act. Social-justice organizations such as Development and Peace (an arm of the Catholic church) and Alternatives (funded by the Canadian International Development Agency) have reported visits by RCMP officers asking what they were planning for the summit. Also paid a call was Robert Jasmin, president of the Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financieres, who told La Presse he sees the visits as an attempt to discourage political activity around the summit.
Call me naive. But I'm still disheartened every time I see our police and security forces so willing to perform political repression at the behest of the federal and provincial governments.
The Chretien government has obviously not learned a thing from the long and politically embarrassing inquiry into RCMP abuses during the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Vancouver just over three years ago. But isnÕt there some officer down the chain of command who is willing to stand up and say, 'This is wrong. This contravenes the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This goes against everything that taking an oath to uphold the laws of our land stands for.' Indeed, is there no one in Jean ChretienÕs cabinet or caucus with the courage to inform him that Quebec City is not Qatar, the fundamentalist police state which will host the next meeting of the World Trade Organization?
The Comite Populaire Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which produced the pamphlets the Quebec City police find so objectionable, is a 25-year-old group that advocates on behalf of the homeless and for social housing, activity that in the eyes of authorities now apparently constitutes a threat to national security. Many of the group's clients live inside the summit security perimetre and will find themselves displaced by the Chretien government's de facto imposition of martial law. Thus, last Sunday, about two dozen members of the group were staging street-theatre scenes in groups of three, each with their own homemade "security perimetres," and distributing the famous pamphlet.
"It's very, very ironic," said Comite spokesman Nicolas Lefebvre Legault. "The pamphlet talks about the right to demonstrate, freedom of expression and the freedom of movement. The fact that they were arrested for distributing this pamphlet tells us that weÕre not completely paranoid in talking about attacks on civil liberties."
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