BC Hydro “safety” searches viewed as creeping jackboots
By Marc Emery, Western Standard
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The government has lost the war against the cannabis culture, the sheer size of our industry in British Columbia and the world shows we are gaining converts and Overgrowing more than ever before. That the Cannabis Culture has won the hearts & minds of the people is clear when we see the methods and doctrines of our sworn enemies. I speak of Langley, B.C.’s new Nuremburg Laws. This is the DEA mentality, the US mentality. The one that said of Vietnam, “we have to destroy it to save it.” And that’s what these new Nuremburg Laws will do to Canada.
It’s impossible to remain a civilized nation when the government labels 60 per cent of Canada’s people as “heretics”. When the people and their critical thinking are the problem, despotism is just around the corner. Polls since 2004 have shown each year a majority of Canadians want marijuana legalized, from 53 per cent to 62 per cent, and gaining each year.
A year ago, a discussion in the movement ensued whereby it was agreed the Nazi phenomenon and drug prohibition were historically comparable — the book Drug Warriors & Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller is the great book on that — but as it would turn off mainstream Canadians, we thought it was best to never use the N (Nazi) word in any discussion about prohibition and Canada’s future.
But in the last month, I have had to reconsider being silent about the comparisons. First, I interviewed important former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Cellerino Castillo, who uncovered the Oliver North Arms-For-Drugs DEA-CIA involvement in Central America. In two shocking interviews, I heard testimony of a man who witnessed and filmed executions, murders, rapes, and did this over several years in central America on behalf of the DEA. Castillo still has the passports of everyone he saw murdered and dispatched. CastilloÂ’s book Powderburns is a searing and difficult book to read because itÂ’s incomprehensible that the U.S. government is made up of monsters who know this is all going on.
A few days after these intense interviews, prohibitionist authority figures in British Columbia were proudly announcing their most recent tactic. It is a tactic these prohibitionists predict will be implemented across Canada; every house in Canada that uses electricity can be invaded over and over again by the state with impunity.
Wrote Bryan from New Westminster to me in October, “I’m getting so sick of this Hydro-electric monitoring. I have four large tropical aquariums with heaters, and I’ve had BC Hydro show up with the New Westminster Fire department at my house four times this past year. Each time these people are going through my entire apartment looking for ‘unsafe wiring’. I know its simply because my hydro bill is higher than normal for an apartment this size.”
Looked at objectively, this is the most comprehensive and uniquely invasive surveillance system in Canada. An Inquisition based on lies at that. But arenÂ’t all the inquisitions based on lies? None of the statements from civic leaders, fire departments, hydro officials and especially police and elected officials are true. And no elected official ever points out the absurdly invasive nature of sending bureaucrats to houses based on power consumption to intimidate owners and tenants.
Chances of a ‘grow-op’ fire are miles below that of a cooking fire. Weapons are almost never found in raids. Resistance to police in these “raids” is virtually unknown. Therefore our Kevlar jacketed SWAT teams and their late-night raids become solely an expression of sadism and terror, essential ingredients in any inquisition.
The proof of this is when a government decides to by-pass the existing legal system and set up its own repressive system with new laws. The purpose of these new laws is to allow persecution of a group that could not be sufficiently abused under the old legal system.
Reported in the October 25, 2008 Vancouver Sun, this back door attempt to invade people’s homes appears to have created a special category of search warrant for police to use exclusively on marijuana growers. The BC Supreme Court has ruled the “safety” inspections do not violate the Canadian Charter. However, the court said any police accompanying the inspection teams would have to have a warrant.
The main reason for the appearance of these “safety” teams — with the power to fine you thousands of dollars on the spot, evict you from your home, report you to police, order expensive repairs, report anything they deem interesting to whatever agency they choose, as there are no limits to what can be done with the information gathered — was that it took “too long” to get a warrant, and that it took too long to make a case that would stand up in criminal court.
Previous court rulings have said that a hydro bill alone is not enough to get a warrant, so what you have is a new paradigm for law in Canada.
In reality, these inspection teams have an automatic search warrant, the first of its kind in Canada. All it requires is a hydro bill provided by the police, the electric company or the municipality. This is simply the way to bring back The Writ Of Assistance. Remember those?
If you are under 50 years old, perhaps you do not (the Supreme Court tossed them out in the 1980s). They were the 24-hour anytime/anywhere search warrants exclusive to the RCMP’s drug squads, no judge needed. City or provincial police who wanted to search someone’s house for a non-drug issue but couldn’t get a warrant used to take an RCMP narc along because they alone had Writs of Assistance. Now it’s back as the “Safety” Writ of Assistance.
Thousands of “safety” inspectors armed with the new hydro search warrant will carry out the ultimate battle; ridding Canada of every single marijuana plant in every single home in every single municipality in Canada.
Sixteen per cent of Canadians have consumed cannabis in the last year, a larger percentage than any other westernized nation, according to a 2007 United Nations survey. ThatÂ’s perhaps four million Canadians over the age of 15.
This new legal regime will necessitate the largest repressive state organization imaginable to achieve the goal of a cannabis-free Canada.
In the dystopian book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the local firemen no longer put out fires — instead, their job had evolved to be the incinerators of every controversial book. In fact, in that bleak future world envisioned by Bradbury, fires had largely been eliminated, physically. The world had been made very safe. The dangers were now the thoughts in people’s heads, ideas put there by books.
Enacting extrajudicial punishments, on-the-spot fines, unannounced home inspections at any time based on your purchases from the government monopoly utility, is turning the entire democratic premise upside down to eradicate a peaceful culture of 4 million Canadians for something 60 per cent of Canadians think should not be a crime at all. There is no other single law that the citizens want repealed more than the prohibition of cannabis, yet we are prepared to gut our constitutional bedrock to wage a war on fellow Canadians.
It used to be that prohibition meant media demonization, moronic myths, black markets, some stiff penalties, and hypocrisy; but, until recently, the actual constitutional structure that is the foundation of Canada remained more or less intact. The courts with all their safeguards concerning your privacy rights were there.
Not anymore.
Judge for yourself these two statements:
“Justice is no aim in itself. We must exterminate the idea that it is a judge’s function to let the law prevail. That is pure madness.” Adolph Hitler
“A general consensus at the forum was prevention and deterrence will have to come from other avenues than the courts.” Weeding Out Drug Houses, Langley Times, Oct. 18, by Monique Tamminga
A conference of prohibitionist politicians, police, bylaw officers, real estate agents and property managers admitted police cannot stop marijuana growing in Canada as long as the current system of criminal law exists. They were referring to the legal system upon which Canada was founded. It ensures Canada is and remains a civilized and just country with safeguards for basic individual rights and freedoms. For the marijuana culture that legal system and its safeguards are now a memory. They were extinguished while Canada slept.
“Why should I care about marijuana prohibition?” straight people often ask me. This is why. We awake to a new world order, one that has historical precedent.
The Langley Times reported: “’To put a dent in grow-ops and meth labs, it’s time to consider the problem as a public safety issue and get away from relying on a failed court system,’ said Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis at a forum held in Langley City on Thursday.”
According to The Langley Times piece, prohibitionists blame the “required judge-approved warrants and other technicalities” for the spread of marijuana gardens. What used to be the bedrock of our Charter Rights is now a mere nuisance technicality, not to just police, but the entire government bureaucracy and civil service at all three levels of government.
As the Langley symposium showed, these bureaucratic inquisitors currently have the right to invade your home anytime they want and as often as they want, treat you in a rude and abusive manner without consequence, shut off your power on a whim, search your home, fine you into financial ruin, evict you, and publicize it all forever.
