An Excess of Democracy and the Case for Hope

Protest against anti-terrorism laws in Edmonton, Alberta. Credit: Unknown.

By Matthew Behrens

After 20 years of working with the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group on issues reflecting Canada’s insidious role in perpetrating the worst 21st century human rights abuses, I remain optimistic and hopeful. My faith is built on a key lesson that can never be learned enough: “We do,” as the late war resister David Dellinger reminded us, “have more power than we know.”

That scares the hell out of secretive state security.

While we’re rightfully concerned about each new iteration of repressive legislation and their increasingly elastic definitions of legality and morality, we seldom conclude that agents
of state terror push such laws because they’re afraid of us inspiring outbreaks of democracy and resistance.

That fear is reflected in huge resources devoted to state security surveillance of social movements. During the early 1980s anti-nuclear and anti-cruise missile resistance, the
RCMP was incredulous that spontaneous protests were popping up, and their search for a Soviet cell coordinating the whole movement was as fruitless as it was ridiculous. Fast
forward to the pre-pandemic uprisings of 2020, and Jason Kenney, Justin Trudeau and John Horgan parroted the same notion that the Indigenous rights solidarity movement had
been “hijacked” by evil outsiders.

The late civil rights leader Ella Baker once reflected that her organizer’s job “was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence.”

In 1973, direct democracy and participatory politics led the planet’s leading power brokers (including members of Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet) to form the Trilateral Commission. Their
1975 report, The Crisis of Democracy,1Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, “The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission,” New York University Press, 1975: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/29/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf1 shivered with the conclusion that the social movements forcing real changes in those tumultuous times resulted from an “excess of democracy” that had to be reined in by the elites’ viewpoint that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

The Trilateral Commission concluded the dangers to “democracy” as they defined it — smooth functioning of Wall Street and Bay Street — come “not primarily from external threats […] but rather from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized and participant society. […] The problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy. […] Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.”

The fact that state agencies continually push for more secrecy and repressive tools is a testament to how scared they are of small groups of us who call their bluff, and who question their racism, threat exaggerations and incompetence. State security agencies couldn’t see a threat when a convoy of white supremacists came to overthrow the government because they were too busy trying to find links to Indigenous land defenders or Muslims or pacifists (they were also sharing information with their white supremacist brethren in the streets).

It’s helpful to reflect on our victories, however modest. Security certificates are no longer used because we made it politically impossible to do so: a regime consistently used for decades suddenly dried up. The 2007 Charkaoui Supreme Court of Canada decision was a landmark moment in which stigmatized, demonized, racialized, securitized human beings finally had some of their humanity recognized — they had Charter rights like the rest of us. That was the result of years of organizing and sticking to our principles.

A few years after Charkaoui, the head of CSIS lamented our role in turning these men into “folk heroes.” While this campaign showed we can seriously restrain state power, it also revealed how the hydra drew a few more heads, employing security certificate precedents to systematically integrate secret hearings into the inadmissibility stream for refugees and immigrants.

When we organized an anti-torture caravan in 2008 to support Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, the RCMP went into overdrive. Given that the state monitors our phones, they knew one of the men was unsure about joining. The night before we started, he learned his mother had been called in by secret police overseas and asked why her son might join the caravan. This act of intimidation angered him so much that he joined for a remarkably healing event as a whole community of non-targeted people provided loving support during the weeks we spent on the road. Later, we learned the RCMP opened a major surveillance and investigation project on the caravan labeled “Criminal Act by Terrorists.”2Matthew Behrens, “RCMP labels anti-torture caravan a ‘Criminal Act by Terrorists’,” rabble.ca, May 17, 2017: https://rabble.ca/columnists/rcmp-labels-anti-torture-caravan-criminal-act-terrorists/2

Labeling our work as “terrorist” is a reminder that, despite government, RCMP and CSIS assurances that they would never consider protests to be terrorism under Canada’s anti- terrorism laws, this remains standard operating procedure3Alex Boutilier, “List of protests tracked by government includes vigil, ‘peace demonstration’,” The Toronto Star, March 29, 2015: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/list-of-protests-tracked-by-government-includes-vigil-peace-demonstration/article_21d103f1-571f-511a-a332-29668ef8623e.html3 inside Canada’s state security agencies, as it has been since long before Confederation. Those assurances didn’t stop the RCMP from monitoring Indigenous rights groups, like Idle No More, as alleged security threats under Project Sitka.4Matthew Behrens, “Trudeau’s Trumpishness bulldozes Indigenous rights,” rabble.ca, November 23, 2016: https://rabble.ca/columnists/trudeaus-trumpishness-bulldozes-indigenous-rights/4 Indeed, this equation of protest with terrorism is so ingrained within state security culture that no one even thought to redact the phrase from the caravan surveillance documents.

Ultimately, ICLMG and member groups show that principled resistance and a refusal to compromise on what’s right makes a difference. Far too many organizations still deal out members of the communities they are supposed to represent in the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim dichotomy. But the refusal to be afraid has marked ICLMG with Roch, Monia, and now with Xan and Tim.

I fondly recall an introductory meeting with someone who had borne the brunt of a decade of horrific terrorism slander as they related their case to Tim and Xan. Neither batted an extra eyelash. They listened, they asked questions, and they asked what they could do to help. We can learn a lot from that.

Matthew Behrens is a writer and social justice advocate who works with the targets of state security repression.

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