The Dire, Insidious Machinations Factored Into Canada’s Bill C-51 of 2015
A growing number of states have moved to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison. An audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group gloating about the industry’s success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors. “Speaking during a conference in Washington, DC in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted ‘model legislation’ that states across the nation have passed in recent months.” AFPM represents a number of major fossil fuel giants, including Chevron, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.
“We’ve seen a lot of success at the state level, particularly starting with Oklahoma in 2017,” said Morgan, citing Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the motivation behind the aggressive lobbying effort. “We’re up to nine states that have passed laws that are substantially close to the model policy that you have in your packet.”
Friends of the Earth organization recently tweeted that “Big Oil is now using its political power to try and criminalize protests of oil & gas infrastructure. This legislation has potential to punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment.” (https://theintercept.com/2019/08/19/oil-lobby-pipeline-protests/ …), and in an article titled “Oil Lobbyist Touts Success in Effort to Criminalize Pipeline Protests, Leaked Recording Shows,” The Intercept reported, “In leaked audio obtained by The Intercept, AFPM conceded its behind-the-scenes role in crafting state laws to criminalize oil and gas pipeline protests” (theintercept.com) From the article:
The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression. “Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system,” Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May. As The Intercept’s Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks “has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in … Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota. The AFPM lobbyist also boasted that the template legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support,” according to Fang. In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the version of the bill there, which is being challenged by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Even in Illinois, Morgan noted, ‘We almost got that across the finish line in a very Democratic-dominated legislature.’ The bill did not pass as it got pushed aside over time constraints at the end of the legislative session.”
What many Canadians don’t realize is that it is also now technically illegal to protest corporate enterprise and activities on environmental or Climate Change grounds. Should any company, corporate lobby group or industry choose to enforce the law, protesters can be arrested, jailed and/or fined. This has actually been the law in Canada ever since the passing of Bill C-51, a gross Liberal/Conservative coalition legislation that passed under the radar for most Canadians, with only Greens, Women’s March activists, environmentalists and Indigenous Peoples coming out against it in force in early 2015.
I think most people couldn’t actually credit the dire, insidious machinations entailed in the proposed Bill C-51, and so weren’t responsive to the threat to themselves, posterity, their country or their progeny. The corporatocracy represented by the Conservative Party in Canada (Enbridge, Monsanto, the list is too long for any self-respecting democracy to credit) and its plutocrats favoured it, as it had been drafted specifically to protect their interests and to defeat the interests of anyone who opposes them by making their lives hell. With tactics including exhaustive litigation, on the mild side of ‘punishments’ for asserting one’s voice or political will, but also including arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, and — if the U.S. under their version of this Bill, the so-called ‘Homeland Security Measure,’ is any example (and it usually was, at least with the ‘Harper Government’ in power) — torture, at the extreme end, such a measure would undoubtedly succeed in its sociopathic aims.
Seems incredible, I know. But that’s the point. With this Bill in force, it’s not. It is, horribly, frighteningly, entirely credible. These, and all such suppressive measures, may literally be applied, as written, at the discretion of policing agencies, to which Bill C-51 gives ultimate discretionary powers. This would be bad enough if local, provincial, and federal policing agencies were merely the ones we remember from childhood, as having -
- in some places and with the involvement of some, particularly ignorant, immoral, and/or brutish individuals — persecuted First Nations groups and environmentalists unconscionably for years, or of having participated in the rapes, abductions and murders of disenfranchised women — poor, powerless or First Nations women on Vancouver’s Eastside — at the Pickton pig farm, for example, or the recent scandal involving police predation on women under their control (under arrest) in rural Alberta. But policing agencies in Canada are now a different, even more frightening species of police altogether, having been trained, inculcated, equipped and armed with deadly force to counter Civil Disobedience and apply effective ‘crowd control.’ Training and technical support has been rendered to this end by foreign military agencies such as the former Blackwater Ops or XE Services, and other, mercenary, professional military contractors, most intensively over the past decade. Which is what explains the very different look of your local police force, their war-ready equipment and weaponry.
Where, formerly, certain police were very, very dangerous only if you were non-white, non-male, or non-white male, they would now be very, very dangerous to everyone who has, and who asserts, their inalienable Human Rights under Bill C-51, from the Right of Free Speech, to the Right of Assembly, to the right to perform non-violent protest, to having and maintaining an independent political will, to defending one’s autonomous Voice, or right to self expression — and many of the other fundamental Civil Rights we take for granted. Even William Gibson, in his speculative-fictive visions of dystopian, plutocratic, information- control futures, must have been taken unawares by this one. To his enduring credit, and to his very great personal loss and peril, Edward Snowden has warned us. It is now incumbent upon us to take heed of his alerts, which have demonstrated the amount of surveillance of ‘private information’ by corporations (which include Facebook, by the way). Surveillance by policing agencies, at the service of governments, at the service of corporations, at the service of plutocratic corporate heads constitutes a sinister, nested set of conspiracies against Civil Liberties, and against the Public Good in general. Mass media information trading and legalized piracy has already brought us to the brink of a ‘Brave New World’ that no one (by which I mean, us 99%), excepting those in financial control (the infamous ‘1%) wants, by means of tactics currently illegal according to the constitutions of most democratic nations.
This Bill made it all entirely legal, irresistible, and incontrovertible — which is the definition of a Totalitarian, fascistic state by any measure. A return to Feudalism under an aggressive, corporate, economic regime in the technological Age of Information is not anything any of us (99%) would ever want to see, much less become victim to. The legitimization of criminal tactics on the parts of governments in service of corporations, via bills like C-51 and Homeland Security in the U.S. began with the legalistic sleight-of-hand entailed in giving Corporations the status of legal ‘persons,’ thereby giving them the protections of Human Rights. Incorporation had already, long been used as a tactic to protect responsible individuals, such as corporate heads, from liability in law suits, as no one individual was then answerable or responsible in the face of claims. Thereafter, any claim against a corporation could be counter-sued, as ‘slander’ or ‘libel,’ as the corporate defendant was now a ‘person’ with recourse to such legal measures under Civil and Common Law. Then, whether the complainant won the case, in principle, or lost it, they were neutralized and, in fact, ruined; the corporation could afford to keep a case in litigation literally for years — decades — with teams of corporate lawyers, lawsuit insurance, and unlimited funds, while the actual human complainant and their resources would have been long since exhausted.
Now, with Bill C-51, the ‘final solution’ to the main, corporate problem — that of troublesome, actual ‘persons,’ with free-will, legal protections, Right to Privacy, Intellectual Freedoms, Civil Liberties, and Human and Civil Rights, who are constitutionally entitled to resist their amoral, only-for-profit, sociopathic designs upon our world — could well be solved. Ultimately, under Bill C-51, corporations, having already attained human status as legal ‘persons’ and the Human and Civil Rights that go with it, will have the only, real protections at law, and actual humans who act against profitable corporate interests will have lost them. And these are not the only casualties. The human Voice, the Humanities, the Arts, the (free) sciences, the human social norms associated with participation and accountability, the arts and culture of the participatory Polis, our vocal and kinetic involvement with our personal, national and global destinies, and with the evolution of civilization itself, will have lost both legitimacy and actionability as legitimate, ‘human’ concerns.
Conversely, the corporate, profit-based, fundamentally sociopathic and inhumane business model would have obtained sole, legitimate claim to all such rights and privileges once associated with Human and Civil Rights by sheer attrition (and this on a global scale, as the reach of multinational corporations and their lawyerly constructs is vast, if not yet absolute), for perpetuity, ad infinitum, to our incalculable detriment, ad nauseum, pro tempore, or ‘business as usual.’ The only legal remedy would be to pass legislation granting legal personhood and therefore Civil and Human Rights to the Earth and/or the environment, as has been done as a hedge against corporate rapine elsewhere, with litigious recourse granted to environmentalists and anti- Oil and Gas exploitation activists who protest fracking, pipelines, tanker traffic, deforestation for oil exploration, marine mammals-killing underwater oil exploration sonar bombardment, drilling for oil in endangered ecosystems, leaking oil rig platforms in delicate marine ecosystems, etc..
