I know that many out there will think my little choo-choo has finally gone around the bend.  Have I slipped into madness?  To think that the government staged burning police cars and smashing windows is just insane, right?  And that is exactly why governments get away with it.  It is insane.  But let’s look at the most important evidence:  the motive.

The first measure of the veracity of a conspiracy theory is motive.  This is where most conspiracy theories fall apart.  If their is no compelling reason to conspire to do something why go to all the trouble and risk?  Take the Kennedy assassination for instance.  This conspiracy has been around for 47 years now but the problem with every scenario is the why.  Kennedy was in trouble politically.  Why waste a bullet and drawing all that attention on a president that was about to become another one term wonder.  But in the case of the G20 the motives are strong, compelling and multiple.

First there was the enormous cost of the security operation.  While it certainly is the least important of the motives it is still compelling.  An election is almost certain within the next 5 to 12 months.  Having spent over a billion dollars on security how could the Conservative party face the electorate if nothing very notable had happened?  This is a variation on the old saying ‘What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?’ In this case what if they spend all this money and the protesters don’t cause enough damage.  With Canadians suffering economically the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be spending money frivolously.  Especially not after FakeLakeGate.  The only way to be sure that the protest would get out of hand and frighten Canadians was for police agents to physically start the process.  After all you can’t trust a bunch of tree-hugging, hippie, leftist peaceniks to start a decent riot now can you.

This brings us to the second motive:  frightening Canadians.  In the pages of this blog and billions of others around the globe people like me have been warning of the impending security, financial and environmental reckoning.  Even the Pentagon report to the Bush administration stated clearly that this planet will not be able to sustain a population of more than 3 billion people by 2100.  That is less than half of today’s global population and less than a third of the 9.1 billion projected for 2050.  The Pentagon estimate I should add is the most generous of all I have encountered.  Most others estimate a maximum sustainable population of around one billion and a few even less.  The lowest estimated sustainable population for 2100 that I have come across was approximately 100 million.  Today there are a few hundred thousand climate refugees.  Within a few short years there will be millions and then billions.  James Lovelock suggests we built barricades and heighten security if we happen to be among the fortunate to live in a part of the globe that will still support human life.  To do this we must end this dalliance with democracy.  But we may not have to worry about that.  The financial and security reckonings may preempt the ecological.  Spillover from Iraq or Afghanistan or more likely both has the potential to draw in major powers resulting in large fast population reduction with the added turmoil, dislocation, lingering deaths of such a war destabilizing much of what survives.  And the financial meltdown has only begun.  It will play a role in the timing and ferocity of planetary ecological degradation and destabilization of global security.  The unwavering faith of our leaders in the American economic model shows their intellectual inability to conceptualize anything else thanks to a battered and bankrupt education system rather than the strength of the system.  Laissez-faire capitalism is a chimera.  It has failed every time it has been attempted.  But this time it has been pushed farther and the very institutions that society had created over the centuries to protect itself from the worst consequences have been systematically dismantled or undermined by the priesthood of the New Right.

Government officials may deny the inevitability of these events.  They may assist their lackeys in the main stream media to foster confusion.  But at the highest levels they know as well as I do that these events will take place.  Their plan or assumption is that they will be among the survivors and the rest of us be damned.  To do that they must heed Lovelock and end democracy.  To seize power arbitrarily would trigger a backlash.  Too messy and uncertain.  Much more effective to convince Canadians to surrender their rights and freedoms in the name of security.  A quick survey of the letters to the editor in support of the police actions in Toronto should prove beyond a doubt that the tactic is working.  Canadians seem more than willing to surrender everything they say they fought for in the world wars and are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan.  What irony to send troops half way around the world to fight for a value we do not prize at home.  The G20 events in Toronto had a powerful effect on the unsophisticated and uninformed.  We will see the anti-terrorism laws renewed expanded when they next come up for review and we will see a general and substantial increase in police powers over the next five years.  The G20 protests will be as powerful a symbol in the hands of Canadian elites as 9/11 was to American elites as they stripped the liberty from Land of Liberty.  They needed it and they got it because they did it.  As simple as that.  Any who question rising authoritarianism will be shown pictures of burning police cars as Americans who question are shown the images of 9/11 and in an earlier generation on another continent those who questioned were reminded of the Reichstag fire until the die was cast and they could be silenced more effectively.

The final motive is chaos.  In chaos it is a human tendency to cling to the known rather than fly to things we know not of as Shakespeare might say.  New economic ideas, new ecological initiatives and new diplomatic peace initiatives all take a leap of faith.  It always seems risky to move in a new direction.  And it is risky but better risk swimming for shore than cling to a sinking lifeboat.  Is it a surprise to anyone that those who benefit most from the status quo should want to disparage alternatives.  By painting the protesters as the lunatic fringe, the current elites can assure the support of the timid which is most Canadians who face the challenges of day to day living.  As Otto von Bismarck said  so eloquently ‘A man who relies upon the state for his pension is not likely to rebel against that state.’ By the time most Canadians realize that their comfort is no longer exists it will be too late.  In this way the political and economic elites of this country smear their opponents and solidify their support.  It is a bold stroke.

So there you have it.  The motives for the government to commit insanity.  I suspect that many remain unconvinced.  They will say that this is too Machiavellian.  After all these are good people, good Canadians.  We just don’t do these kind of things or have these kinds of motivations.  To those I say this.  To deny that the above is plausible is to deny:

• that there were no Residential Schools;
• that there have been concentration camps in Canada (1914-18, 1930-36, 1940-46);
• that Canadian POW camps at the end of World War Two allowed Nazi officers to hold courts martial and execute German prisoners under our protection with guns and bullets supplied by the camp administration;
• that over a million Canadians were spied on and blacklisted by the RCMP during the Cold War.  The information gathered shared with the United States.  Many had their lives and / or careers destroyed.   Several committed suicide or died prematurely from stress.  Their crimes included subscription to the wrong journals, activity in their trade union, support for the United Nations, support for peace, etc.;
• that there was no Maher Arar;
• there is no Omar Khadr.

The list could go on but I think you get the picture.  So before you judge me mad you must first explain why our government should be trusted given the track record.

What the public needs to see is the evidence that could only be attained through the use of the enhanced police powers contained in the anti-terrorism laws and how that evidence directly prevented catastrophic loss of life.  Anything else is diversion.  Everything thus far released could have been achieved using standard police procedures.  Why then do we need the added tools of the anti-terrorism law.  That is what must be justified if those laws are to be extended. 

The weakness of the government’s arguments for maintaining the anti-terrorism laws is demonstrated by the mock explosion.  The only reason to include that footage is to terrorize the public.  Terrorism in service of preventing terrorism, there is a metaphor for the new millennium.  Scared and confused the electorate is prepared to accept whatever the government claims will safeguard them, whether it really will or not.  I am surprised that this footage was allowed in court as it is clearly irrelevant.  Whether you are planting a bomb capable only of cracking a ceramic pot or a nuclear device capable of taking out an entire city, you are still committing a crime.  What possible value could a demonstration of the blast from a particular size of explosive be in a trial to determine if these men were guilty of plotting a terrorist attack?  Would they have been less guilty if the explosion planned had been for instance half the size demonstrated.  Or is this the purpose of out anti-terrorism laws?  Are they needed so that the crown may enter irrelevant and inflammatory evidence in order to convict by hatred and anger rather than law.  If so, then it is a frivolous and dangerous justification. 

Eight years after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington it is time to return to sanity and allow these over-reactions to pass into history.  In the wake of those events a terrified population lost track of what this country and western democracies are supposed to stand for.  Yes it is a dangerous world out there and yes we should be vigilant against those who would threaten our lives.  But in being vigilant let us not become vigilantes.  Let us remember that while law and individual rights and freedoms can leave us vulnerable to dangers, the dangers of a police state without rights are far greater.  In retrospect the chaos of Weimar was preferable to the order of the Third Reich.