Civil, Yes. Silent, Never!

Here behind the lines, we’ve had another case of someone picking up a gun and running amok, this time in Arizona.  The victims range from a 12-year-old to a member of the US House of Representatives.  This is horrific.  Please find some time to pray for the people who were violated in this outrage.

Some have done other than pray.  Some have decided that even this situation should be exploited to further the attempt to force into silence those who seek to stand witness to the abuses of governing and regulatory institutions and departments.  We are indeed fortunate that the attempts to establish links between speaking out and gunning down have been labeled as being ridiculous.  Jon Stewart, on the Daily Show, has done a fine job at this, so there’s no need to labour the point concerning the tenuousness of the link, based as it is on psychobabble.  We should be civil. But every day there’s more and more indication that we dare not keep silent, and it is more and more imperative that the message of the erosion of our freedoms needs to be heard.

One particular pattern of the erosion is particularly troubling.  Governing and regulatory formations need to have both authority and power.  These are granted to it in order to perform a necessary function.  The loophole is that the powers granted could be exercised in a generic manner, unhitched from the necessity that predicated their granting.  So if those exercising authority decide to undertake a task, even, let it be, a worthy one, it can frequently be expedient to exercise the power that was granted for another purpose.  This creative use of the power can even prove to be rewarding.  An example of this pattern made the news this morning.

On the outskirts of the BC Lower Mainland, at the end of the commuter rail service line, one finds Mission BC.  Like many areas in BC, it has a problem with a particular entrepreneurial undertaking known as the marijuana grow-op.  Let’s be clear: these things are dangerous.  In themselves, they can ruin structures, and cause fires.  They can also be the cause of violence, because there is vicious competition in the drug trade, and a grow-op can bring that right to one’s quiet residential neighbourhood.  So what to do?  The CBC reported on what was done.

Unless electric power is being stolen by circumventing metering, running a grow-op is going to cause a spike in electricity consumption to be noted.  Well, municipalities have inspectors, and Mission has passed a by-law that empowers its inspectors to visit any place that shows a consumption spike, and conduct an inspection.  They bring the RCMP with them on the visit, so there is no delay if during the inspection a grow-op is discovered in dealing with it.  And while the inspectors are there, the report recorded how they look for anything else that might be wrong, so that they can bill the homeowner a $5200 inspection fee, for about a half hour’s effort.  To summarize: your power goes up; you are put upon by municipal authorities on the pretext of crime-fighting, and your pocket is picked for thousands of dollars.

This got my attention because of an electricity bill we received a few months ago.  There was a large spike in the apparent power consumption, and we wondered what was going on.  The utility thoughtfully includes a graphical representation of the customer’s power consumption over the past months, and this period stuck out like a very sore thumb.  An enquiry identified the spike as coming from a reading error, not a rise in power consumption, and appropriate adjustments were forthcoming.  But we had dodged a bullet (or at least I think we have; they may come for us yet).  I live in a province where municipal inspectors and Mounties will use a power spike to invade my home, and potentially bill me big time for the intrusion, if they think they can get away with it.  And let no one doubt the determination of these authorities.  Mission authorities acted under a by-law that parallels one in the City of Surrey that had been declared unconstitutional.  Now, in Surrey, inspectors need a warrant if all they have to act on is what could be an error – and they won’t get one without corroborating evidence.  Until one stops these folks explicitly, it seems, they just keep on coming after us.  They can’t take even a constitutional hint.

What we should note is that this creative use of authority has a long and apparently accepted use in government formations.  I used to work for a federal government agency that was affected by the employment equity findings regarding equality in pay and employment opportunities.  Part of the ruling concerning putting things to right in this area involved everyone being educated about the new rules and procedures.  That ruling gave to the executive of the agency the duty, and the power, to call employees to attend meetings where the rules and requirements were laid out.  Now employment equity had been an issue for some time, and the agency I worked at had already made creative use of this fact.  We didn’t have just an employment equity committee.  We had an employment equity and diversity committee.  The committee’s membership was interesting to note.  Members were chosen from each group that had been named in employment equity legislation.  So we can see where the “employment equity” part of the committee name meant. What did the “diversity” part mean?   What other groups were represented?  Only one: the GBLT (and perhaps a few other letters) community – and that was it!  No Sikhs, no Muslims, certainly no Christians, nor any other group that the census data had clearly indicated was a minority in the area and not mentioned in the equity legislation.  But let’s see whether practice gave credence to a misappropriation of power.

One minority can indeed carry the banner for the causes pertinent to minority in general.  The Catholic Church, through Vatican City diplomats, stridently presses for religious freedom in countries of the world, and not just for Catholics, or even just for Christians but for all.  Did that happen through this committee?

Having been duly summoned to the legislatively mandated meeting, I signed in on the form that was passed around.  It was a meeting scheduled for about 90 minutes.  On the top of the form, the only references identifying the meeting were those pertinent of employment equity legislatives requirements.  And indeed, the meeting began with a presentation of the attributes and requirements pertinent to that piece of legislation.  On it went until all slides had been shown, and the presenter (from outside the agency) finished.  It took about 15 minutes to fulfill the legislative requirement, but there we were, booked in for another hour and a quarter minimum.  Now what?  Diversity, of course.  And was it a presentation directed at the concept in general?  Not on your life!  That cat was let out of the bag when up went a slide that asserted that homosexuals were homosexuals because they were born that way!  When asked to provide a scientific reference to that assertion, the presenter (she alluded to her lesbianism during the presentation) couldn’t, of course, and tried to make the requester seem obtuse, and fortunately failed.  No principles here, just an agenda to further.

So here we had it again.  A legislative mandate existed.  It was there for an explicit purpose.  However, those with the power to execute the mandate made creative use of that power for another purpose.  In so doing, they not only perverted the mandate and the due process that properly attended it, but also undermined the rights of those on whom they exercised the power.  And of course, attempting to undermine or silence someone who objected was de rigeur.  Diversity was, after all, a core value of the agency.

Those who perpetrate these abuses have a very, very big stake in succeeding in silencing those who will have none of the abuse they peddle.  That’s bad.  But when the pattern of abuse is woven into the very warp and woof of governing and regulatory formations, silence is the very last thing that should be forthcoming.  Whether a by-law enforcer, a government agency, or a court, where power is abused to further a particular agenda, it must be called out.  Let no one be silenced because of the false premise that to decry abuse of power in an ostensibly good cause, be it public safety, diversity, even freedom itself, is to attack any of those good causes.  Let the reader be assured that no by-law official will enter my residence, because of the past spike in my power bill, without one devil of a fight.  Remember Pastor Neimoller ‘s observation that by the tie they came for him there was no one left to object.

Here behind the lines we can no longer assume that those in authority will necessarily let moral principles prevail against the expedient assumption that the end justifies the means.  The enormity of shootings like those in Arizona needs no elaboration.  It is horrible.  But what it is not is a valid basis to call for silence on the part of those who oppose the abuse of power.  Yet those calls have been made. The good news is that when people like Jon Stewart can skewer that attempt with comedic satire, the call serves only as a self-identification of those who would attack morality and freedom.  It would be good to take careful note of those who call for silence as a result of this horrible episode.  Let us hope their calls are drowned out by civil, but strident and insistent calls for and end to attacks on morality and abuses of power, along with guns and bullets.