Canada’s Cops Aren’t Listening to the People, So We’ve Got a Problem

On Tuesday, I got an email.

"hi there. i just heard from our manager in nanaimo that the rcmp is cordoning off the store." [sic]

"The store" was a medical marijuana dispensary. And the RCMP were following through on a threat that they had been making for weeks: shut down, or we'll shut it down for you.

So the Mounties screamed into three Nanaimo weed shops, armed with weaponized yellow tape.

"We do not permit people to sell legal or illegal liquor or prescription medicine on a street corner," said Superintendent Mark Fisher of the Nanaimo RCMP in a statement announcing the raids.

Fisher said that the storefronts had been—hold onto your pearls, everyone—"actively soliciting business by having sales people stand outside and/or waving signs to solicit customers."

Bring me my smelling salts.

I hate to break it to the superintendent, but prescription drugs and alcohol-peddlers do advertise on the street corner.

The Nanaimo RCMP had organized the raids despite the fact that seemingly nobody, including the town's mayor, wanted them to do so.

The same week, Halifax police busted a medical marijuana lounge in the city's North End.

Across the country, local police forces—including the RCMP—have declined to play bad cop to the hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries that have cropped up. After all, the shops aren't even that illegal. But several other police forces have aggressively busted the operations.

Cities like Vancouver even decided to regulate the shops. They slapped strict restrictions to ensure that they're not letting in people without prescriptions, children standing on each others' shoulders in a trench coat, or a family of deer that just want to get high.

And, of course, Justin Trudeau has vowed to legalize marijuana, which will likely mean anyone will be able to buy pot from shops just like those in Nanaimo (though it's still unclear who will be running Trudeau's mary jane funhouses).

Possession of cannabis, and its derivatives, is legal, so long as you have a prescription. It is nominally illegal for an individual to purchase that marijuana from anyone other than a regulated grow-op, via Canada Post. It's quite illegal to purchase marijuana for the intent of re-selling. The Criminal Code also criminalizes fortune-telling, but I don't see the RCMP kicking down Miss Cleo's door, pepper-spraying her in the face and screaming: "Bet you didn't see that coming, did you?"

In the eyes of the law, everyone with a prescription who walks out of a medical marijuana store and lights up a spliff is doing so perfectly legally. So who are the RCMP helping?

"We had a grandmother allege her 15-year-old grandchild had purchased marihuana [editor's note: his spelling] from a storefront," Fisher said.

I understand that Fisher may be deriving his authority from the Freaked Out Grandmothers Act of 1934, but I'm not sure that is exactly iron-clad policing, there.

Now, perhaps Fisher and the Nanaimo RCMP were a bit bored. The last press release from his RCMP detachment, from five days prior, is entitled: "Who took Dan's hockey gear?"

Who, indeed, Nanaimo RCMP. Who indeed.

The problem might be with Canadian cops more broadly.

Now, most cops are great. I don't want to throw undue shade at cops. I in no way carry a grudge from that time two riot cops in Montreal clubbed and arrested me. No grudge.

But the last few years have completely turned the tables on the relationship between the police and the people they're policing, and the cops have often been slow to recognize that.

Snowden blew apart confidence in the intelligence-collecting programs of cops and spies. The painfully-common police shootings of unarmed black youth, and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement, put a spotlight on the huge racial impact of policing.

Here at home, the cops have had it good over the past decade. But a number of incidents—everything from the how-the-fuck-are-you-still-doing-this debate around carding to the High River gun grab, the clusterfuck that was the 2005 G20, and the sexual assault allegations in Val d'Or—have forced the police to actually explain themselves to the public, which is not something they're tremendously used to.

For one, the RCMP were supposed to have bought body-worn cameras more than a year ago. Instead, they've piloted some cameras, then scrapped them, then they wrung their hands for a bit. Now, they're back to the drawing board again.

The RCMP also won't give us details about how many people they shoot in a year. Beyond the raw numbers, we know very little about how often they shoot at Canadians—even though they manage a database on that very topic that we're not allowed to see.

In August, regional police chiefs voted to ask for new powers to obtain Canadians' personal information without a warrant, search your mail, collect information on law-abiding citizens, and to confiscate and sell your cellphone if you're making door-to-door pot delivery calls, which should freak out even the most statist big-government weirdo.

Then, this fall, the government of Ontario finally moved to fix one of the craziest regulations in the country—it is impossible to suspend an officer without pay, unless they're convicted of a crime.

And then, this week, the RCMP repeated its request to have warrantless access to Canadians' information from their internet and cellphone providers, even though the courts said that power was unconstitutional.

"We are committed to exploring […] how Canadians expect the police to enforce the laws on the internet, and one of those may or may not be warrantless access," said Jeff Adam, Chief Superintendent of the RCMP, in response to a question from the nerds over at Motherboard.

There is, however, some hope.

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson (his name is Bob Paulson) seems like he's beginning to see the light on this whole thing.

At a speech in November to a group of security specialists, Paulson repeated that he wanted access to Canadians' information without a warrant (boo), but that he understood why Canadians would be freaked out by that (yay).

"We're chasing the wrong Holy Grail. I am all for new legislation, I am all for warrantless access to subscriber info," he said, but (rightly) concluded: "that's not my call."

While Paulson said that he's still looking to "chase down the laws where we can" by convincing Canadians that the police need the powers or else child pornographer terrorists are going to hack all of our cellphones (or something), he seemed to tip his hat to Canadians' concern with having the RCMP reading their emails all the time.

Paulson seemed to concede that he might not get crazy new investigative powers, and that he might just have to deal with that.

So maybe, just maybe, the police are starting to get the message that they have to answer to the people that they're policing.

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