Police state here we come.

Since both agencies lied about their involvement initially, how do we know they're not lying about further involvement? Who else is the EUB spying on and why? What other branches of the Alberta government are doing the same? Is information being gathered at taxpayer expense to further the aims of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta? The problem the Alberta Tories now have is regardless of what they say to deny any spying, that one of their government boards, stacked with party supporters, was caught spying, and then denied it. It makes any other denials of spying on the part of the government, should they come, ring hollow. After all, they've already lied about it once and it's only because they hired an inept private investigator this time that they got caught.

The Sûreté du Québec (SQ) now have a similar credibility problem. By lying about the officers at the outset, it now looks like they're lying again when they say the officers, being the only people in the crowd armed with rocks and sticks, weren't there to start a riot. The fact that public safety minister Stockwell Day appears to be trying to sweep the incident under the rug isn't helping matters either. Of course some people would ask "Why would the police want to start a riot?". Well they wouldn't, but their political masters would love to see one where the police are cracking a few political opponent heads. It would give the people who control the police, the government, an excuse to remove civil rights in the name of "security". This would explain Day's reluctance to have the matter looked into. It also explains why the police would want to start a riot, because they were told to.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The actions we have witnessed are the actions, not of a democratic government doing the will of the people, but of an authoritarian/dictatorial government trying to stay in power. The major totalitarian regimes of the past 100 years all had secret police forces that spied on their own citizens. These police forces would also perform public acts of violence in the guise of political opponents to enable these governments to crack down on political opposition in the name of security. By using and condoning these same methods (remember, nothing was done until the methods were "outed") the governments of Alberta, Quebec and Canada are beginning to look more and more like totalitarian regimes such as the Stalinist Soviet Union, Germany in the late 1930's and various other authoritarian or totalitarian regimes throughout the world during the last 100 years. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Following the spying and provocateur actions by government agents, expect to see a curtailing of civil rights in the name of security. It's already happening south of the border in the United States, and our own version of the Republicans, the Conservatives are just dying to do the same here. Thankfully it's harder here given the political realities of a minority parliament, however that could change and we could be looking at a governing Conservative majority running amok with no accountability or checks on its power. Then see the amount of spying increase. Every protest is potentially violent as the government seeks excuses to arrest political opponents. It doesn't take much for that to happen if you realize that dictators like Hitler didn't seize power overnight, but slowly accumulated it over time until it was too late to stop them.

So in these troubled times, it is more important than ever that we as citizens keep a watchful eye on our government and leaders. It's important that we all ask them the tough questions that they try to avoid and squirm out of, to question their every action in fact. Failure to do this will diminish our democracy over time eventually kill it. If that happens we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.