It was a dark day for democracy last Saturday when that great, glowing bastion of peace, freedom and French fancying Quebec, called in the riot squad on a group of peaceful protesters.
Making matters worse is the fact that the group in question were organized and lead by The Collective Opposed to Police Brutality. A group founded to oppose the province's Surete du Quebec or S.Q. - named after France's Surete Nationale. Made up entirely of Anglo-phobic Francophones, the S.Q. operate under the paranoid delusion that they are a national police force and conduct themselves in a way befitting an imperial occupying force, in the worst tradition of Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Highlights include firing three-hundred rounds into a hotel room thought to be a drug den which had actually been rented by a family on vacation; The indiscriminate tear-gassing of protesters during the 2001 Free Trade Area of the Americas (F.T.A.A.) summit in Quebec City, firing for maximum range, mostly hitting people nowhere near the infamous fence; Several incidents of point-blank firing of C2 gas; And two officers threatening to tie a homeless man wearing only shorts and a T-shirt to a pole in minus thirty weather.
And it was these fine, upstanding credits to peace, order and good government who decided that a peaceful protest against them as not all that legal and utilized aggressive, military-style tactics to stop them from doing that. Once again demonstrating that there are some words that just do not translate, 'irony' being one them.
