Crisis and Questions

             by Kenneth Bagnell

      The first words Prime Minister Harper spoke in The House of Commons on what he envisioned in the wake of the murderous tragedies in Montreal and Ottawa was “surveillance”. (His sentence went: “Our laws need to be strengthened in the areas of surveillance, detention and arrest. They need to be much strengthened. I assure members that work which is already underway and will be expedited.” The word “surveillance” and the promise to increase it, are what interests me.  My interest in surveillance’s uses by the population –apartment lobbies and modern elevators, public spaces and private homes -– had been piqued a day or two before.   

          I purposefully entered a new store in a neighborhood not far from my own, one selling surveillance items. The store manager was affable and didn’t, as I might have expected, treat me warily. “I notice the clock you have in the window,” I said, “the large white one.” She smiled, nodding. I asked how a clock could provide surveillance. “Because it’s not just a clock,” she, the manager, replied, “it’s a camera.” She then put her finger on the number ten, specifically its zero. “The camera is right in there,” she said, “so if you hang the clock above, say, your living room mantle the whole room can be quietly filmed.” We talked a bit more, then when I was leaving, I noticed a book standing open on a shelf. “How much is the book?” I asked. She smiled, paused and then spoke: “It’s not a book. It’s a camera. It also has wide angle coverage.” It made me wonder. And, to be honest, worry a bit.  But if the Prime Minister favors more surveillance, maybe the public –- as the store owner I saw — does as well. How do you like it?

     It’s one thing for a store owner to install protective cameras against petty thieves, a practice so common friends insist that if you walk a block on Toronto’s Yonge Street pausing to window shop and browse a half dozen stores, you’ll be “on camera” fifty times. That’s one thing, but to do so as the Prime Minister envisions means that, in time, the entire society could be under watch or perilously close to it. That should provoke our deep wariness. It’s too early to say as he has, that the Ottawa tragedy is terrorism. For one thing, both dreadful incidents of recent days were carried out by lone killers, not an organized, maybe underground, agency. Secondly, the strategy envisioned by Ottawa’s commitment to share, through Bill C-44, its intelligence gathered from both home and abroad, is more incendiary than it appears. A week or so ago in Toronto’s Eglinton St. George’s United Church one of Canada’s most respected MPs, a former Minister of Justice & Attorney General, Irwin Cotler, called for caution concerning the current government’s inclination to treat the Ottawa and Montreal incidents as being the launch of terrorism. As he put it: “We don’t yet know all the facts we should know. We must be very careful as to what we really have learned from this. We should not indulge the incidents for unduly enhancing powers.”

     To me there’s no need now to delve into whys and wherefores of a proposed alliance between Ottawa and Washington. That strategy has already been seriously criticized by people who know its dangers far more than most of us: the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner. For me, that’s enough. It tells us that Canada is taking a quite worrying path to a future fraught with possibilities we probably wish we didn’t have to think about.

        Mind you, there have been wounding reductions in the budgets of those professionals who have long been charged with this responsibility, the RCMP and CSIS. Jack Harris, a Newfoundland MP, was right when he said on CBC Newsworld that their budget troubles should be rectified. But to make it more reasonable he reminded the government of their competence: “They’re not amateurs — after all it was they who brought down the Toronto 18 in 2006.” (Some are still imprisoned, one having been given life.)                                                 

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      It’s now well over half a century since Aldous Huxley in his book Ends and Means, shone an incidental light on aspects of an era now very distant.  But my memory of the words was piqued by the recent provocative Rob Ford mayorality, and then the subsequent city election in Toronto. “Technological progress,” Huxley once wrote, “has merely provided us with a more efficient means of going backwards.” Technological or not, our city, gained little or nothing for its citizenry during the recent years of Mr. Ford’s mayorality; it became at times, days and nights of sensationalism, a virtually circus-style TV showcase and almost globally.  I don’t want to list the reasons, but it may be enough simply to say that Mr. Ford is still reported to be under investigation for questionable affiliations. Don’t rely on my opinion, take the Globe & Mail’s civic columnist, Marcus Gee who the morning after the election wrote on the front page: “Rob Ford’s mayorality has been the weirdest episode in the modern politics of the city, perhaps the country.”  He’s right and that’s enough of that.

       The new mayor, John Tory, won by a decisive but not overwhelming majority: 40 percent, over the runner-up, the mayor’s brother Doug (who replaced him when he took ill) at about 33 percent and Olivia Chow with 23 percent. The main reason why Rob — a man with questionable qualifications and burdening defects — won office in 2010, was largely his outmoded anti-Toronto sentiment directed at “the downtowners.” They’re supposedly “wealthy, snobbish sophisticates” when, in fact, the great majority are not.

     Like any journalist who often travelled Canada in the 1960s and 1970s I met this tired sentiment in almost every province, most of all in the city of Calgary where every problem that city had, at least back then, was laid at the feet of Toronto. Once called, in a puritanical era “Toronto the Good,” it had become the opposite not just to Western Canada but also to Toronto’s neighboring Ontario boroughs who became Torontonians in the amalgamation of 1998. (An act of the Ontario government under Premier Mike Harris brought together East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough and the old city of Toronto. Opinions vary as to its success.) The former boroughs were the main Ford backers but by no means entirely. (I’m sorry to include this but I should: the supporters of the mayor’s brother Doug — actually booed, and loudly, the announcement the night of the election of Mayor John Tory. Doesn’t that tell us something?)

       For the past decade Toronto has been in a troubled state largely over our long outmoded infrastructure, our rutted roadways and, perhaps especially, our once fine transit system now unable to cope with Toronto growth. John Tory, a man given most of all to planning, has in mind an overall transit plan called “Smart Track.” It will relate in new effective ways to Go Transit, the established train system that brings and takes home thousands of commuters to Toronto every day.  Then comes the decaying infrastructure which any car driver or passenger can attest to. The barriers, the reroutes, the almost unbelievable numberless potholes, present a formidable undertaking. The city staff has recommended a step: dismantling a site many of you who are visitors have crossed: The Gardiner Expressway.) In general Tory resists it and I think he’s right: take it down and you make the proverbial “long commutes” to and from nearby towns even more so.

      Each of these and more are on the desk for Toronto’s new mayor. If anyone is up to it he is. Why? Because his life experience has given him opportunities to learn the hard road to becoming a leader. He’s seasoned. He was defeated once for mayor, then led the Ontario PC party for several years. He has treated these as milestones, learning places. He has the mind, the experience and the credibility to become, just maybe, one of the great mayors of Toronto’s history.

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For your information: The Hon. Irwin Cotler was recently opening speaker in a yearly justice series at Eglinton St. George’s United Church, 35 Lytton Blvd, Toronto. This year’s series is called: “A Justice System for a Just Society.” Three others lecturers are to follow. On November 23^rd, Kim Pate, Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, speaks. On January 25, the speaker will be Kate Johnson, Chaplain of Queen’s University.  February 22^nd, Anthony N. Doob, Professor Emeritus of Criminology at the University of Toronto will give the concluding lecture.   Each lecture starts at 12.30 pm. You are invited and do bring a friend. Further information: 416-782-7478 or: jimwblack@gmail.com

All my past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome there: www.kennethbagnell.com.