The Council of Canadians

Would the government and corporate media rather see violence than discuss the secret agenda of the Security Prosperity Partnership?

Would the political masters of the Surete du Quebec (SQ) rather have a riot than hear the voices of dissent discussing their secretive agenda? On August 20th Communication, Energy and Paper-worker (CEP) union president

Dave Coles confronted three undercover Quebec Provincial Police officers dressed as radical protesters, one with a large rock in his hand, at the Montebello Security Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit. These three officers crossed a line.

They weren’t there to monitor the crowd, they were there for political purposes, to incite violence so that the media and government could discredit the protesters and ignore their message. These police officers were endangering the lives of hundreds of innocent people, breaking the law, and attempting to deny our constitutionally guaranteed rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. They were also degrading the reputation of the policing profession. These accusations would normally be written off by the mainstream media as a conspiracy theory except this time these police officers were caught on video.

The Secret SPP agenda

If we are concerned about human rights, the environment, labour standards, product safety, energy security, our economic wellbeing, world peace and stability, democracy and freedom then we should be concerned about the Security Prosperity Partnership and the secretive corporate agenda that is driving this process. Too often we focus on these single issues without understanding how and why they are linked and who is pulling the strings for the decisions that affect us. The leaders of this corporate agenda divide and conquer civil society by attacking us on multiple fronts concurrently. These issues are all intertwined and connected.

“Is the sovereignty of Canada going to fall apart if we standardize the jellybean?” Stephen Harper at the Montebello Summit

Our Prime Minister would like the Canadian public to believe that the Montebello summit was about standardizing jellybeans. Do you honestly believe that George W Bush would come to Montebello to talk about jellybeans? Why is there so much secrecy around the SPP process?

If it’s about jellybeans then why are these leaders consulting only with the top thirty corporations in North America and locking out civil society? Why was there no representation from labour, environment, First Nations, health and other organizations that represent the majority of the population? Do the corporate CEO’s speak for our interests or for their own special interest group, the 1% of the population that is ultra-rich? We contend that George Bush was in Montebello to secure access to Canadian oil, gas, water and other resources for the US National Energy Program, strategic reserves and military industrial complex. He was there to further the agenda of fortress North America.

Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule – the Documentary

In late spring this year I started working on a documentary with the Nanaimo Chapter of the Council of Canadians about TILMA (the Trade Investment Labour Mobility Agreement between Alberta and British Columbia) and the SPP (the Security Prosperity Partnership between Canada, Mexico and the United States). Since March, Bob Hansen had been making presentations to local municipalities about TILMA and how it relates to NAFTA and the SPP. Most of the people hearing these presentations had not heard of TILMA or knew very little about it and how it was going to affect their ability to carry out their democratic functions. That’s because, like the SPP negotiations, TILMA has been negotiated in secret with input from large corporations only. The public, local governments and the elected opposition members of the provincial legislatures have been left out of the discussions.

After conducting interviews with people like Gordon Laxer, Theresa Healy, Erin Weir and Maude Barlow I became alarmed by the extent to which these agreements will affect our lives and erode achievements our society has worked for over many decades through the democratic process. I encourage everyone to check the following websites www.candians.org and www.stoptilma.com and find out more about these insidious agreements. There is far too much information to include in this article. The SPP affects every federal ministry and over three hundred regulatory areas. It will have a negative affect on almost every aspect of our lives.

If you go to http://canadians.org/integratethis/backgrounders/index.htmlyou can read Gordon Laxers presentation to the parliamentary International Trade Committee where he raises concerns that unlike Mexico, the United States and most developed countries Canada has no National Energy Program, no strategic reserves and no energy security program. You can read Theresa Healy’s extensive research on deep integration with the US and how this will affect security and regulatory regimes in Canada. Other articles provide background on how the SPP will affect food safety, pesticide standards and how this agreement is being implemented by stealth in an undemocratic process. A leaked document from the Center for Strategic and International Studies called North American Future 2025 Project identifies secret plans covering a number of issues of concern including bulk water exports.

The SPP is the first trade agreement to include security integration. We have already seen the implementation of US Patriot Act programs like the no-fly list, profiling and the further integration of police and security intelligence databases. Biometric identification and increased surveillance are also part of the program. The Canadian Military is going through a process of deeper integration with the American armed forces. The SPP will affect Canadian sovereignty in many more ways than just our ability to make decisions about nutritional labeling on jellybean packages.

Both TILMA and the SPP will eliminate the regulations and standards that protect ordinary citizens from profiteers. Why are we getting substandard and unsafe products from China? Because corporate profit has been allowed to trump environmental, labour, safety, health and human rights standards. China is an unregulated market and the North American corporations are pushing to deregulate our market so we can compete on a level playing field, this is a race to the bottom. TILMA gives corporations and individuals the right to receive an award for challenging democratically instituted regulations and standards that “restrict” or “impair” their ability to make a profit. This will eliminate the authority of local governments to regulate in the public interest. It will accelerate the privatization of public health, public education and publicly owned utilities such as water and sewage systems. Currently TILMA is an agreement between BC and Alberta but Stephen Harper wants to import the salient features of TILMA into the existing Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). TILMA softens the ground for the SPP and American and Mexican states will soon be able to sign on. Will we bring Alabaman and Mexican standards up to those of Canada’s or will we lower our standards to meet theirs?

The Protest

After raising $1000 in donations towards my travel expenses at the Grass Roots festival in Nanaimo, I traveled to Ottawa for the SPP protests on August 19th and 20th. I took the bus with Maude Barlow, Dave Coles, and other members of the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Labour Congress and various unions to Montebello on the morning of Monday August 20th. I shot video of this group attempting to deliver 10,000 petitions against the SPP to the gates of the Montebello resort. An agreement to accept the petitions was cancelled by the government an hour before the scheduled delivery time. Instead riot police met the delegation. As protesters reached the site more riot police marched through the gates of the Montebello resort, the highway was closed and blocked with cement barriers, additional battalions of riot police were dispatched down the highway and appeared from the woods across the street. The riot squad lined the side of the highway for half a kilometer leaving protesters in a corridor blocked on one end by riot squad and flanked on one side by a large fence and on the other by riot police. We were boxed in and if the riot police attacked, then the crowd would have had to run a gauntlet of plastic bullets, tear gas and pepper spray. Maude Barlow and many other protesters decided to move back towards the village of Montebello and get out of an obvious trap.

The mainstream media reported that there were only a few hundred protesters and Prime Minister Stephen Harper would later comment on how “sad” this was. The truth is that there were between 1500 and 2000 protesters but most of them could see that the police intended for there to be a riot, and they stayed back a safe distance. I was at the front line for over two hours and documented the crowd and the police response. The protesters were peaceful, they chanted, sang and danced in the street. The riot squad tried to push the protesters back and many of them responded by sitting down. In one corner protesters pushed back and stood their ground. I spent time standing on a traffic barricade with the camera hoisted over my head video-taping the scene. I was well positioned to capture footage of anyone provoking a riot on the front line. I saw the police arrest one protester and grab the sign (on a stick) of another protester standing at the front line. I watched the police ramping up their presence. All the frontline police were armed with truncheons. Behind these officers were more riot police with tear gas launchers and pepper spray guns. Helicopters hovered overhead constantly. The police were gearing up for a confrontation, but the protesters were not giving them a justification.

While standing on the traffic barrier I saw a couple of rocks fly over my head toward the police. They were tossed from behind me and one of them hit a young woman in the head. The tension was building. Unlike other member of the media who had gas masks and helmets, I wasn’t prepared for tear gas, pepper spray and clubs. I decided to move back from the front and find Maude Barlow for a follow up interview. I shot footage as I walked back along the gauntlet of riot police that lined the road in the graveyard. I found the group I had arrived with casually hanging around in front of a squadron of riot police lined up across a side street between the graveyard and a building. I wandered back to the street corner and watched some street theatre. When I turned around I noticed CEP union leader Dave Coles telling a group of men that they should go to the other section of the protest if they wanted to wear masks. It was the third time that Dave and others had done this in order to keep their green zone peaceful. I turned on my camera at approximately 3:07 pm and the rest you can see on the CanadiansNanaimo channel on www.youtube.com or on our videos page.

Three masked men stood out from the other protesters, they were well built, burly, clean cut, middle-aged men, they didn’t look like the other young, skinny protesters that wore masks. One of them was carrying a large rock.Dave Coles told them to drop the rock and take off their masks. He also accused them of being police. They responded by pushing him around. They obviously weren’t legitimate protesters. The younger protesters told us that these three men had tried to get them to be aggressive with them. It was shocking. Here we were at a peaceful protest and these three were trying to incite a riot. Were these the same people who had lobbed the rocks I saw earlier?

It appeared that they were working with the riot police when they leaned up against them to talk. One of them pulled a riot shield down slightly, something that would have caused a retaliatory response from the police if he had been a real protester. The riot police made no attempt to disarm the man with the rock. One of the three was telling the riot squad the operational code word for the day so that their mock arrest would be a soft one. After a few minutes the three fakes eased their way into the police line to be arrested. The police did not remove the masks or photograph these arrestees even though this was the first thing the police did when they arrested other protesters. The police stop videotaping as soon as the fake protesters were mock arrested. It was the matching boots that really gave the police away.

After the protest I returned to Ottawa and documented the SPP forum hosted by the NDP. Back where I was staying I did a second interview with CHLY (Big G interviewed me at 4pm in Montebello) and then uploaded the footage of Dave Coles confronting the three police officers to Youtube at about midnight. At the time I still wasn’t sure that they were police officers, they could have been CSIS, CIA or hired thugs for all I knew. I backed up my footage and in the morning I posted the second Youtube video about the attempt to deliver the petition. I did a third interview with CHLY, dropped a couple of back-up copies of the footage in the mail to trusted friends and left Ottawa.

The whole thing felt disconcerting, I traveled across Ontario working on another project I’m developing and wondered who these men were and who gave their orders. I had the same feeling in my gut that I had working on documentaries in Guatemala and Chiapas with trade union and human rights activists who were being harassed and threatened by government forces. Is this were Bush and Harper are taking us? I was somewhat relieved when the SQ admitted it was their officers but something is still clearly wrong with this incident. I have to agree with Stephen Harper on one point; this protest was sad, it was a very sad day for democracy in Canada.

A little media analysis. I chose Youtube because I didn’t trust the media with this story and I wanted people to see and discuss this video without media filters.

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In their first reports after the CEP press conference CBC was skeptical and CTV cast as much doubt as possible. Even after the SQ admitted it was their officers, the corporate media was largely uncritical and misleading. I watched a distorted story on CTV news that showed the riot on the same street corner as the provocateur incident. The news report showed the riot and then stated that “a short distance away at a more peaceful part of the protest… three police officers were discovered working undercover”. All the CTV reports claimed that there was violence between riot police and protesters all afternoon. In actual fact the riot didn’t start until at least an hour and a half after the incident with the police officers. In my second Youtube video I interview Maude Barlow at 4:30 with a peaceful protest site behind her. The riot started after the majority of the protesters, approximately 1500 of them, boarded buses and returned to Ottawa and Montreal.

The National Post did not report on this story until Saturday, after it had been on the national news on all three networks for the previous three days. They made a joke of the situation with a mock excerpt from the policeman’s diary refering to me as “ a dreadlocked hippie… some loser with a videocam who lives in his mothers basement.” Brilliant! The rest of the Canwest chain gave the story minor coverage mostly quoting and supporting Stockwell Day and the QPP assertion that these officers were carrying rocks to blend in with other protesters. I shot three hours of footage at this protest and the only people I taped carrying rocks were the police!

A call to Action.
Every Canadian citizen who cares about democracy and freedom in this country should be outraged not only by the actions of the QPP who degrade the reputation of policing but also by the secretive actions of the Conservative government and the SPP process. If this concerns you then write a letter to the Prime Minister demanding a public inquiry then copy and send it to Stockwell Day, your member of parliament and the media. Learn more about TILMA and the SPP at the following websites www.candians.org and www.stoptilma.com, then talk to your friends, relatives, coworkers and neighbors. Get involved with your local chapter of the Council of Canadians. Get politically active; the only federal party with elected members unequivocally opposed to the SPP is the NDP. If you want to help us with our documentary and get your name in the credits then visit our website at www.canadiansnanaimo.org and find out how you can contribute. It is through solidarity and a refusal to be silenced that we will continue to defend our rights and freedoms.