Past. Present. Future. The past documents Canada’s history with lawfare, an ancient societal approach where those in positions of authority leverage that authority to suppress and control lower levels of society, which has been with us from Canada’s colonial beginnings. The present is seeing lawfare in action and institutional powers being weaponized against Canadians. There are no indications that lawfare will stop being a part of Canada’s future.
Imagine a scenario where a former female police officer goes public about being the victim of sexual abuse after policing and administrative powers were weaponized against her after she reported the sexual abuse to HR. Imagine finding out that the “psychologist” who she had meetings with at the medical clinic on the University of Ottawa campus was impersonated by someone who was familiar with her employee work file. Imagine the actual psychologist being so upset that he agrees to go on television to do an interview where he stands side-by-side with the former female police officer and goes on record to stay that he did not have any meetings with her, that he did not recognize any of the documentation, and that someone had impersonated him. Imagine police being called in to criminally charge that psychologist for going on the record and stating that he did not have any meetings with the former female police officer, then those charges get dropped without explanation after the psychologist admitted he did meet with her but had forgotten. A shitshow that happened in Ottawa and requires no imagination. It is lawfare against a respected psychologist who has a long history of working with policing and public safety stakeholders and across different levels of government.
There’s also the scenario where Canadians, upset about ongoing wars around the world and the tragedies that result from them, decided to go and protest. A Canadian female youth was arrested and charged for protesting war and the unlawful arrests of other anti-war protestors, even though nobody was harmed and nothing was damaged. Crown prosecutors explained that she was arrested because she disturbed a community member’s cat and dog, and made them feel unsafe, after she spoke over a speakerphone. Of course, the judge declared that the “disturbing the cat” argument would not be accepted in their court, but still decided to impose anti-democratic “release conditions” on her, banning her from communicating with the other protestors who were arrested, from using social media related to the Middle East conflict and from participating in protests related to those matters, even though she had no prior criminal history. Around the same time, another woman who was counter-protesting and decided to rip off a Muslim Canadian woman’s hijab and saw the charges of assault, mischief, and harassment simply dropped. These are more recent shitshows that happened in Ottawa and also require no imagination.
As someone who also has first-hand experience with having policing and administrative powers weaponized against them, lawfare is nothing new and its origins are rooted in colonialism. For me, lawfare was the result of ruining a high-level undercover police operation related to illegal online gambling activities (one that I also hacked in my late teens), after police failed to contain it and members of the Serbian- and Bosnian-Canadian community were harmed, including minors. This was after an RCMP officer refused to get involved and suggested that the staff at the restaurant find a friend to assist them (which is how I got involved), and also after I escalated the matter all the way to the highest levels of federal government and oversight. And it occurred after Ontario Civilian Policing Commission concluded their review of my complaint that they advised me was closed a year prior, and while I was interviewing for a role within the RCMP. What is it about shitshows and Ottawa?
Thanks to my educational background and expertise, I was able to counter the lawfare abuses directed at me by a handful of street-level police officers and some more senior officers. Then I also managed to save, arguably, one of the most popular Canadians from domestic interference/manipulation attempts, whom policing and public safety stakeholders failed. Then I identified the exact public policies and legislative failings, the core of the “carding” issue, that enabled bad actors to weaponize the same powers they get entrusted with. All of this was before the Ministry of the Solicitor General chose to embrace ignorance and cover for the lawfare directed against me, at the municipal level, and to de-democratize the Freedom of Information process by refusing to share what the Ontario Police College teaches police recruits to do when they get police reports wrong. Because Serbian- and Bosnian-Canadian lives (especially minors) do not seem to matter, just like how Canadians across other lines of difference have been shown how their lives do not matter. Not a shitshow, per se, but a democratic failing more akin to totalitarianism, certainly not part of Canada that gets advertised to people from around the world.
My experience with lawfare and a review of the public policy and legislative failings that allow the weaponizing of police powers is an article that is in the works, and it will provide more context around the systemic problem. A far more relevant matter, however, is how lawfare is rooted in Colonialism and how today’s “democratic institutions” are having their institutional powers weaponized to go after the civil liberties and to criminalize Canadians who refuse to remain prisoners of conscious.
Lawfare in Canada: The Colonial Era, The Post-Confederation Era, and Today’s Era.
Lawfare is not exclusive to Canada, nor do our institutions rank as the biggest perpetrators of lawfare, but many Canadians may tend to believe that lawfare no longer exists. If it does occur, then there may be the belief that we have the necessary checks and balances in places to catch these abuses and correct them. But this would be terrible thinking because there are countless examples of recent lawfare, and many more when we look back at Canada’s history.
During the Colonial era, lawfare came in the form of a “treaty or bullet” offer, where the legal frameworks were the primary, almost singular, tool used to delegitimate Indigenous populations. Such treaties were written using one-way language that favoured the colonizing settlers with forfeitures forced upon Indigenous tribes. One example is the Indian Act of 1876, legislation that was written for the purposes of granting administrative powers to control and delegitimatize Indigenous communities by taking control over the “Indigenous Identity”, by restricting autonomy, seizing land, and attempting to destroy cultures and identities.
During the Post-Confederation era, lawfare expanded and resulted in major disputes between provincial and federal governments over access and control over resources. Lawfare continued to be leveraged against Indigenous communities, Canada’s most marginalized population, by arresting and jailing members of Indigenous tribes who protested resource extracting activities on their traditional lands because of the destruction of those lands that they relied upon for food and water. And there are countless other instances of lawfare being leveraged to criminalize and incarcerate other marginalized populations including Black Canadians.
The current era of lawfare abuses has seen a variety of ways that policing and administrative powers are weaponized, especially against protesting Canadians. COVID-19 normalized lawfare. People were forced to pay ridiculous fines for breaking protocols nobody would follow today. Livelihoods were lost. Businesses destroyed. Families broken up over differing positions related to COVID-19. In Quebec, the Supreme Court declined to hear a legal challenge related to the large-scale refunding of COVID-19 fines and ordered that such cases must be pursued separately. Whereas in Manitoba, a significant number of COVID-19 fines remain unpaid, but there is no initiative to refund those who paid their fines.
Considering how the media landscape has changed, how the new norm steps away from hard thinking directed at uncomfortable truths and centers around the summarizing press releases, lawfare is unlikely to disappear any time soon. What is evident is that civil rights and liberties are no longer guaranteed (maybe they never were), and a reminder that the institutional powers behind lawfare are vast and unchallengeable.
Criminally Charged for Upsetting Cats and Dogs During an Anti-war Protest.
A Canadian female youth was criminally charged for upsetting cats and dogs during an anti-war protest, though nobody was hurt and no property was damaged. Go back to the start of the paragraph and reread that sentence once more. That Canadian female youth, ethnically Arab, was arrested and criminally charged for protesting, like how many dictatorships and totalitarian regimes operate—but we are in Canada, and not somewhere on the other side of the world. Then the court came up with some bullshit “release conditions” like she was some sort of militant hardliner. Countless Arab-Canadians have come to Canada fleeing oppression and war, over the past 157 years of Canada’s existence, but could they have ever imagined that the same abuses of authority would victimize their children for being anti-war? Probably not, because that is not the Canada that we advertise to the rest of the world when we say things like, “this is a place where people across all lines of difference would be proud to call home”.
To be clear, this young woman did not assault anyone, break anything, or make threats against anyone. What happened to her was an egregious attempt to suppress Arab-Canadian voices from organizing anti-war protests, perhaps at the behest of elected officials pressuring policing agencies to do something. Not a first, and unlikely to be a last, but it is very similar to how the U.S. government responded to anti-war protestors who protested the Vietnam wars in the 1970s.
As it stands, “Legacy Media” has not mentioned the full details of the charges that she is facing. They did not mention how the Crown prosecutor told the judge that the female youth had upset cats and dogs and how the judge responded by telling the prosecutor to drop the “disturbing cats” part of their argument. What they do display is not the violation of any laws by anti-war protestors, but an attempt to remind society how vast and unchallengeable institutional powers can be, reverting to the lawfare tactics from the Colonial Era of Canada.
Personally, I hope that the Canadian female youth chooses to violate her release conditions by messaging and checking-in on the other protestors who were “criminally charged”, by continuing to make anti-war posts over social media, or by attending a future anti-war protest and borrowing a speakerphone to say whatever she wants to say. Because then Canada will have seen an innocent female youth get jailed for protesting peacefully, and violating conditions that should not have been present in the first place.
One relevant campaign video that has been making rounds over social platforms references a famous quote by Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919), an attempt to describe Canada, “Canada is free, and freedom is our nationality.” That saying may still hold true for some Canadians, but it is a giant question mark when it comes to being ethnically Arab or religiously Muslim in Canada. Because the precedent that has been set is that counter-protesting adults can take actions that strip Muslim Canadian women of their dignity, like ripping their hijabs off, and have their charges dropped, while Arab-Canadian female youths will get criminally charged for peacefully protesting ongoing wars when they manage to upset cats and dogs.
