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In 2007, Benjamin “Monty” Robinson killed a man named Robert Dziekanski. Because he was an on-duty RCMP officer at the time, he was not charged with any crime.

In 2008, Monty went for a drive after having a few drinks. He smashed his Jeep into a motorcycle and killed a man named Orion Hutchinson. He fled the scene but returned a short time later; his fellow cops didn’t administer a breathalyzer test until 90 minutes after the crash. Monty’s driver’s license was suspended for all of 90 days, and he had the gall to challenge even that slap on the wrist. It has taken the authorities more than a year to press charges. Now, instead of facing a charge of drunk driving causing death — which carries a life sentence — Monty has been charged merely with obstruction of justice, for lying to his fellow cops after he fled the scene of his second crime.

Here we have a man who has killed innocent people twice through his own irresponsible actions — a man who ran away instead of taking responsibility for what he’d done. Has he been held to account for either death? No. He’s only facing the obstruction charge because he lied about what happened. If you or I did what Monty had done, we would be behind bars for the rest of our lives. But Monty has a badge and a uniform, so even if he’s convicted, he’ll be walking the streets again in a few years’ time.

One set of laws for you and me, another set of laws for the cops. That’s how it is.

The BC government has passed the Assistance to Shelter Act, which gives the cops the power to kidnap people off the street — by force, if necessary — and put them in shelters against their will during “extreme weather conditions.” The law is targeted at homeless people, although there’s nothing in the text of the act that says so.

Naturally it’s just a coincidence that the law has been passed three months before the Winter Olympics come to British Columbia. The law has nothing at all to do with the consistent pattern of Olympic host cities clearing their streets of undesirables in the lead-up to the Games:

South Korea’s military dictatorship cleared out 720,000 people for the 1988 Seoul Games. Private security forces roamed the streets at night, using rape, beatings and arson to break community resistance.

But it doesn’t take a one-party state to bring out the jackboots when the Olympics come to town. Atlanta gained notoriety among Olympic watchers when it declared the central business district a “sanitized corridor” and had police pre-print arrest citations, with the words “African-American,” “Male,” and “Homeless” already filled in. In the lead-up to the games the city arrested about 9,000 people, a “crime” that has significant implications because people with criminal records are not eligible for public housing. Some of the homeless were given one-way bus tickets out of town.

(Hmm. One-way bus tickets out of town? Now where have I heard that before?)

The people who rule us claim they have the best interests of the homeless at heart. After all, they say, last winter a homeless woman in Vancouver’s West End accidentally killed herself while trying to stay warm. You have to wonder if these people have ever actually talked to a homeless person before. Most of the ones I’ve talked to avoid shelters because they feel unsafe there. For some strange reason, they don’t like sleeping in overcrowded rooms where a majority of the other people in the room have addiction or mental health problems and might hurt them or steal what few possessions they have. (Incidentally, the new law makes no provisions for ensuring that the people kidnapped by the cops will be allowed to take those possessions with them when they’re forced into shelters against their will.) I know it’s hard for some people to believe that homeless people might have good reasons for the choices they make, but there it is.

Ah, but by being concerned about their own safety, homeless people are putting their own safety at risk, and we can’t allow that! Back in September, a columnist for the Globe and Mail argued that the state has a duty to protect these people from themselves, even if it means violating their rights. Indeed, the secondary headline on that article reads, “Sometimes ensuring citizens are safe means leaving aside their constitutional freedoms.” This is the reasoning behind laws like the Assistance to Shelter Act. But didn’t we just spend the past eight years proving how terribly misguided and dangerous the false dichotomy between safety and security really is? It’s incredible how easy it is these days for Serious People to justify Doing Whatever’s Necessary to Keep People Safe — without the least concern for the rights they violate in the process.

Seriously, do we really need to have the cops pull people off the street and incarcerate them for the crime of being homeless in the middle of winter? Why don’t we just provide decent permanent housing instead?

There’s nothing unattainable about that solution, by the way. BC deals with homelessness through a combination of emergency rooms, cops and judges, and temporary emergency shelters — an unplanned patchwork of half-assed tactics that leaves many homeless people without the support they need (the province’s homeless population has shot up in the past few years). Not only is this approach both ineffective and immoral, it’s also more expensive than the alternative. Last year, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that it would actually be cheaper to provide our homeless population with both housing and support services, in the form of treatment for addiction and mental illness, than it is to continue doing what we’re doing now.

So why does BC’s government want to spend even more money on an approach (I hesitate to call it a “strategy”) that doesn’t work, when an approach that does work would actually be cheaper? And why do they want to compound their sins by giving the cops a mandate to force our most vulnerable citizens into unsafe spaces against their will?

BC Liberal MLA Harry Bloy thinks anti-Olympic protesters are terrorists:

For this group to take away so much from the Games, to have an opinion not shared by many where they have to gather from across Canada to try and disrupt these Games, to stop a young child or young adult with disabilities from carrying the flame—something he had been looking at doing for months since he was chosen, and he couldn’t carry it in his hometown—I think is disgusting and shameful.

They do not understand, these terrorists, the potential goodwill and economic benefits that come from these Games, because they have a limited intellect and do not understand how the world truly operates.

So if the protesters manage to successfully disrupt the Games, does that mean the terrorists win?

Evidently some poor kid’s desire to be exploited by the Olympic machine is more important to Harry Bloy than police harassment of our most vulnerable neighbors; the failure of politicians to live up to their promises to address Vancouver’s housing and homelessness crisis; flagrant violations of fundamental rights; the creation of a $900 million security apparatus that seems to spend most of its time intimidating critics of the Games and their friends; the prospect of massive public debt and the diversion of desperately needed funding from other areas to cover the $6 billion cost of the Olympics; the horrendous effects the Games have had on other host cities; and all the other issues that are motivating anti-Olympic activism in BC. Indeed, according to Harry Bloy, only someone with a “limited intellect” would be more concerned about these issues than about an absurd and pointless spectacle dedicated to elite athletics, nationalism, and corporate sponsorship. Personally, I think the protesters “understand how the world truly operates” far better than Harry Bloy.

It’s not that I expect anything better from politicians, least of all a BC Liberal. I just don’t like it when my friends are insulted by idiots.

Back in July, the City of Vancouver passed a bunch of bylaws to suppress free speech before, during, and after the Olympic games. Last week, we learned how the people in charge will be enforcing those bylaws:

Organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics will send roving teams of observers with the power to confiscate material that infringes on the Olympic brand outside the venues, CBC News has learned….

The Vancouver Organizing Committee’s 20 observer teams are intended to enforce its agreement with the International Olympic Committee that the local organizers must ensure the venues are “clean” of commercial, political or religious publicity.

That’s right: political speech has been deemed to “infringe on the Olympic brand” and is therefore forbidden.* Never mind that this policy directly violates your rights as expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Larry Campbell took away those rights back in 2005 when he signed Vancouver’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee, which actually requires host cities to suppress their citizens’ civil liberties in this manner for the duration of the Games. (Campbell was Mayor of Vancouver then; now he’s a Senator, proving once again that it pays to watch out for elite interests.)

Of course, if you plan to ignore Vancouver’s illegal bylaws and exercise your rights of free speech and free assembly during the Olympics, VANOC’s Special Higher Police roving teams of observers are among the least of your concerns. The cops have been busy these past few months harrassing anyone who voices opposition to the Olympics — not just activists, who have been subjected to surveillance, interrogation of themselves and their friends and neighbors, and intimidation by the cops, but ordinary people like the 73-year-old man who wrote a letter to VANOC and got a visit from the authorities by way of response. There is also some legitimate concern that the cops are planning to infiltrate protest groups and use agents provocateurs to discredit anti-Olympic activists, just like they tried to do in Montebello in 2007. And then there are the “free speech zones” designed to keep protesters out of sight during the Olympics — in the proud tradition of such bastions of liberty as the People’s Republic of China, which set up its own protest cages during the Beijing Games in 2008.

In response to all this nonsense, the folks at the BC Civil Liberties Association and Pivot Legal Society are training volunteers to act as legal observers during the Olympics:

Like many of you, Pivot and the BCCLA are concerned that when the more than 7,000 police officers, 5,000 private security guards and 4,500 members of the Canadian armed forces arrive in Vancouver this February, their presence may get in the way of citizens’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Bylaws recently passed by the City of Vancouver suggest that we have good reason to be worried.

We plan to be ready, with dozens of people prepared to act as eyes and ears on the streets. Legal observers will be trained to watch for violations and to document and report them.

The first BCCLA/Pivot training session was this past Sunday. More sessions will be offered once a month for the next three months. If you’re concerned about your rights being violated, I’d recommend checking them out.

Or you could, you know, hook up with the anti-Olympic movement, since crackdowns on civil liberties are one of the reasons they’re opposed to the Olympics in the first place.

Here in British Columbia, public libraries get a big chunk of their funding from the provincial government in the form of annual operating grants.* This year’s grants have yet to be distributed, even though we’re already four months into the new fiscal year. If that money isn’t received, we could see substantial cuts to programs and services — stuff like access to online resources, sharing of materials between libraries (giving patrons access to stuff that they just can’t get at their local library), and literacy programs for kids like the BC Summer Reading Club and Books for Babies. The chief librarian at Vancouver Public Library is already talking about reduced hours of operation and even branch closures. And the head of the BC Library Trustees Association has pointed out that “a cut to this year’s grant would guarantee there will be cuts in the future.”

During the last election, Premier Gordon Campbell talked about making BC “the best educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent.” Now his government is planning to cut funding for public libraries, which play a fundamental role in education and literacy. Even worse, this is happening at a time when libraries across the province have seen big surges in use because of the ongoing economic crisis. People are using library resources (books, the reference desk, free public Internet access) to look for work, to find other ways to make ends meet, or even just to cope with uncertainty and stress. Not only is the provincial government threatening to undermine an essential service, they’re doing it at precisely the moment when that service is needed most.

Heckuva job, Gordo.