Olympic Security....Is This Canada?

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The Vancouver Sun's Daphne Bramham, in a story I had missed in all the RailGate excitement, would really like to know:

"There's a knock at the door. It's the police and they want to talk to you about your political affiliations.

They go door to door asking neighbours about you. They call your family and co-workers and suggest that they might call your employer.

You're driving down the street. Police stop you for a not-so-routine check and, over the next 40 minutes, you are questioned and your foreign visitors are warned that they need to carry their identification documents with them at all times.

China? No, Vancouver. It's all part of the security shakedown before the 2010 Winter Olympics are held in what is supposedly one of the freest, most open and transparent democracies in the world.....

{snippety doodle-dandy}

....When Chinese security made surprise "visits" to activists, it was front-page news worldwide with screaming headlines about the repressive, autocratic, military dictatorship.

It should be no different this year.

Canadians ought to be furious with politicians for letting it get this far. We should be jamming their e-mail, voice mail and snail-mail boxes in protest....

In related news, Dr. Dawg informs us that Sergeant Pepper is back on the case with a band that is anything but lonely:

"....RCMP Sgt. Maj. Hugh Stewart has been brought out of retirement to become the senior planner for the Mounties' 2010 Integrated Security Unit. "They're talking over 4,000 police officers and over 4,000 security officers, plus volunteers," Knight said.

Stewart was nicknamed Sergeant Pepper after he pepper-sprayed protesters at UBC during the 1997 APEC conference in Vancouver. The Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP concluded that Stewart did not give the demonstrators enough time to clear the road, and that his use of pepper spray was "not a justifiable or appropriate level of force"....."


Gosh, I for one, sure hope that the good officer Stewart won't be carrying an electrical conductance device linked to multiple deaths instead of pepper this time around.

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