Agents Provocateurs

Like Elizabeth May, I’m not the least bit surprised about police trying to incite violence in Montebello. She was in Seattle for the WTO meetings, I was in Washington the following spring. I was in ’secret’ meetings between organizers and police, an opportunity afforded by the fact that Quakers supported my going there to protest.

In that secret meeting the police chief’s representative looked for ways to prevent an escalation of the conflict, and in the next 48 hours the police force did the exact opposite. They confiscated cooking and puppet making-supplies, branding them pepper-spray (spices) and molotov cocktails (rags glue for papier-mache). While we chanted “Free the puppets” outside the convergence center, a few of us confronted and video-tapped officers that didn’t have their ID number on their uniform (we had one sent home).

Unaccountable, unidentified cops scare me. You don’t know what they’re getting ready to do. Everything the police force had done led me to conclude they were trying to incite violence to delegitimize the protesters.

Unaccountable, unidentified protesters scare me. They’re either working for the police, or being conned into volunteering for them.

Back to Canada. Three burly guys that were trying to cause trouble are now in police custody. Their identity is now known to authorities, and an investigation has to follow. We need to know what organization created to protect us is trying to incite violence.

Is it the RCMP again? Have they gone from spying on the Raging Grannies to paying thugs? Did their investigation of Amnesty International not turn up any plausible sounding terrorists?

Is it CSIS? Some local Quebec police chief that decided he wanted to teach those hippy protesters a lesson?