Dave Coles on Montebello protests

The Harper Index often has interesting posts. Coles shows quite convincingly that the undercover cops were not doing as the official police story claims.


Democracy threat countered by Youtube and indie media - union leader Dave Coles

Agents provocateurs only the tip of Montebello story.

HALIFAX, NS, August 27, 2007: Yesterday, HarperIndex.ca interviewed Dave Coles, the union leader at the centre of the Montebello agents provocateurs story, by phone during his stop at the Halifax airport. Coles is President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers of Canada. He has been active in union organizing since 1967, and got his start with the local representing pulp mill workers in Crofton, British Columbia. We present excerpts of the interview:

HarperIndex.ca: A week later, how do you feel about Montebello?

Dave Coles: I feel disappointed and disgusted. I've been around people being infiltrated all my life in the labour movement. It never stops. These people will resort to every dirty trick in the world.

It's not uncommon in the progressive movements for either the corporate cops or the state police to do this kind of thing. They have used these types of tactics for 100 years, from the Pinkertons to the RCMP.

HI: What's new here?

Dave Coles: What's new here is they tried to agitate or cause trouble with demonstrators who clearly were no threat to anyone. We were dressed in suits and jackets and dresses and sandals, no masks to be seen. We were holding a police line back and held it back for hours.

The police were trying to move on six young protesters who had stopped their line and were sitting in the road, but they didn't have masks on. We had backed away from main gates of Montebello when the police forces got pretty rough with us. A couple of times during the day, some of the direct action kids came to our line trying to get us to do something provocative, and I talked them down.

An hour or so earlier, we were being taunted by the police. They stole from one of my staff a flagpole with a CEP flag and ran through the graveyard taunting us with it.

Our union has a very critical story to tell. Harper and his crew don't want it out.


HI: Was this done by plainclothesmen?

Dave Coles: No, it was the cops, the Darth Vader crew. This is why I maintain that somewhere up the political ladder someone is giving instructions to not let us tell our story. Our union has a very critical story to tell. Harper and his crew don't want it out.

That's why we were in Montebello. It's all about Canada's energy security. The SPP has nine working groups on energy, all corporate executives and bureaucrats. There's nobody there from civil society or politicians. The Harper government is bowing to every American wish possible at the cost of energy security for Canada.

There is no pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in eastern Canada. All production, to get to eastern Canada, must go through the United States of America. Ninety nine percent of all Canadians, including most politicians, don't understand that.

The Harper government has been pushing through the FTA [Free Trade Agreement] to speed up pipeline expansion proposals to export bitumen [unprocessed oil sands]. There are pipeline applications to export 5 million barrels a day of this stuff by 2015. We have applications saying this ain't right. The stuff should be processed in Canada so we get the economic value from it, and the jobs, and society gets to determine the overall value we will get from it. Harper and his gang want it sold and shipped directly to the States. Canada, and especially Alberta, get the pollution, and the U.S. gets the jobs.

When Canadian raw crude oil has to go through the U.S. before it can get to any eastern refineries, including the big Irving refinery in St. John, New Brunswick, don't we have the right to ask "What about Canada's energy security?"

The same applies for electricity. There's no east-west grid, it's all north-south. Ontario is landlocked from Manitoba. All we want to do is make sure these questions get asked so Canadians see how these questions are dealt with. The SPP should be dealt with in the House of Commons. Politicians should be the ones dealing with it, not the corporate elite.

That's why I believe there's corporate interference in our movement. Provocateurs are sent in. The mainstream media won't cover us. What they want to cover is rocks and tear gas. Some mainstream media belittled me in the beginning. I think it's a disrespect to democracy and a threat to democracy.

HI: What was it like on the ground in Montebello?

Dave Coles: There really was hardly any trouble in relative terms to many actions I've been around and seen in the past. This was a church picnic. They had to stir it up. If the real reason the Council of Canadians and we were there were understood, the public would be up in arms about the SPP. It's treated as trivial, they call us the left wing loons, they keep giving us the back of the hand, only this time they got caught.

HI: Who took the video and posted it?

Dave Coles: A young chap from Nanaimo hired by the Council of Canadians, as well as a bunch of citizens taking still photos. I knew in my heart, after I looked these guys in the eye and they shoved me around, that they were cops. I'm a union leader. I've been on picket lines all my life. These guys looked like, acted like and smelled liked cops.

I find it really insulting they say they were carrying rocks to blend in. This guy assaulted me, he shoved me, he fingered [gave the finger to] me. They were marching on a line that didn't have a mask. There's no mistake what they were doing or what we were doing.

HI: What are your next steps? Do you intend to press charges

Dave Coles: We have legal counsel working all weekend on this. We are going to file complaints, when it's to our advantage to expose this assault on democracy.

There are a number of issues that concern us. The reporting of the media and how they refuse to take our issues seriously. There's the issue of the infiltration by the police of a democratic process. There's entrapment, personal assault against me and my staff, the whole issue of political direction. Which politician made that determination they should infiltrate us?

HI: What made the story take off? Technology is a marvelous thing. We had the Youtube and digital pictures, and more pictures coming. We had two or three pretty clear shots of their faces. The cops knew we were going to Facebook them. The media had been talking to me. Sooner or later, somebody in Quebec was going to say "That's my neighbour." There was no way. Facebook, all the blogs. They got caught. Without a democratic free press, there is no democracy. Right now indie media is what's saving our butt in the democracy. Very few Canadians understand the importance of it. The Web is going to be the foundation of democracy for a while.

HI: Do you feel you successfully undermined Stephen Harper's agenda as a result of last week's events?

Dave Coles: Harper, he's just a mouthpiece for corporate capital. Think of the power of the oil companies. Their role in Iraq, the SPP...

A number of media insiders have told me that if they really wanted to have a meeting that didn't have a confrontation, why wouldn't they fly into Camp David or some other armed fortress and leave? They set it up so they could send their goons in. Why would the police steal our flag and taunt us with it, running through the graveyard. We didn't get any pictures, but lots of witnesses saw it happen.

HI: What makes you think it's coming from the Prime Minister's office?

Dave Coles: Past practice, and also history. The guy doesn't like us to start with. I want to know if it's Stockwell Day or the Prime Minister himself who's behind it.

HI: We'll never know.

Dave Coles: We intend to find out.

SQ spooks face up to flip-flop

This is from Rabble although the author seems to be an American. I didn't realize that demonstrators typically fire on police in Florida! The author is probably correct though that there the purpose of the infiltration has nothing to do with public order but with discrediting the protest. It also provides a good opportunity to give police practice in charging, dispersing, and arresting protesters. Many in the public already associate protests with property damage, trashing, and violence against police. Make sure that this perception does not fade.


SQ spooks face up to flip flop


Rogue cops hidden among anti-SPP protesters suggest a dystopic future for North American law enforcement.



>by Keith Gottschalk
August 28, 2007

So the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) inserted three agents provocateurs in the recent protests at the Montebello Masters of the Universe Threesome in order to incite a riot.

Of course, this is nothing new for either the SQ or for the Masters of the Universe in general.

I have an Aislin cartoon from the Montreal Gazette drawn during the standoff at Oka in 1990 showing a similarly storm trooper clad SQ cop confronting a woman with groceries pushing a baby stroller. Her reply: “you guys don't embarrass very easily do you?”

Indeed, if the tap dancing both the SQ and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day are doing over this incident is any indication, embarrassment or shame is in short supply nowadays.

It seems incredible that a public official can claim with a straight face that masked men, holding rocks in menacing manner, doing their best to incite other protesters according to union leader David Coles in the Globe and Mail, were not inciting violence.

Thanks to Coles' quick action, the three stooges were unmasked before something unfortunate happened. Something unfortunate the media now tut-tutting this incident, would have blamed on the protesters.

In light of the eyewitness testimony and the fact that the whole keystone cops episode was caught on film and broadcast on YouTube all over the world, one might ask a la Groucho Marx 'who you gonna believe, the government or your own eyes?'

But it's really all for the protection of the public, right?

The Globe and Mail even quoted an 'unnamed former senior police officer' as saying “if somebody takes a gun out and shoots a police officer or the head of state, how do you identify who did it if you don't have people in the crowd? You can't afford to make that mistake.”

The only problem with that twisted logic is: (1) the protests were kept so far from the conference its doubtful if even a well designed trebuchet would have been able to reach the heads of state and, (2) in all seriousness how often do protesters at public events in Canada whip out pistols and shoot police? This is Quebec after all, not Florida.

At least in Canada there is some light and heat being shed on these tactics and of course, having video evidence helps enormously.

In the U.S., it has long been alleged, to put it mildly, that local, state and federal police agencies employed the same tactics, especially at the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and the Miami Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) protests in 2003 which the mayor of Miami called a “model for Homeland Security.”

Space does not permit a detailed list of the police misconduct and provocations at both protests but Indymedia sites exhaustively covered the details and other Internet-based alternative websites did as well. Of course, the mainstream U.S. media parroted the official line about 'anarchists' and such, and middle America went to bed smug with the knowledge that the people clubbed, gassed and jailed were nothing but un-American troublemakers.

The intent there and at Montabello is for police to provoke any response by protesters in order to wade in with overwhelming force and violence and therefore paint any protest against the Masters of the Universe as coming from violent anarchists and communists.

I am also convinced that instructions to the various police agencies to launch these provocations come right from the top—the powerful who are, as Naomi Klein wrote, seeking to combine Canada, the United States and Mexico into one national security superstate for the benefit of the global financial elite.

After all who needs borders when everyone and their personal transactions are under surveillance?

Not that there wouldn't be the pretense of 'democracy.' After all, according to Klein's column, the protesters could be 'seen and heard' on closed circuit TV at Montabello. Perhaps the Big Three Guys watched the fun while sipping Dom Perignon and trading witty bon mots (or in President Bush's case, dirty jokes). Somewhere George Orwell has a knowing, yet rueful smile.

Provocation and reprisal used to be done in far cruder fashion such as the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Now, protest movements are infiltrated far in advance by often clumsy cops who haven't done their homework on the movements they're trying to 'join.'

Noting all of the preparation that goes into these operations, one has to believe that there's less of a concern for public safety in these events and more of a definite plan to discredit and disrupt otherwise peaceful protests against the global elite.

So the next time you're at a protest and you see three nervous guys who look like defensemen for the Maple Leafs in ill fitting 'anarchist' garb, clutching rocks and looking for a little action, just say to yourself they're not rogue cops.

They're the future of North American law enforcement.

Keith Gottschalk has written for daily publications in the Midwest U.S. and was formerly a radio talk show host in Illinois. He frequents babble as the Américain Égalitaire.

Undercover officers at Montebello defended.

The three did provoke demonstrators, the ones trying to calm them down and not to cause violence. The officers seem to have the situation reversed. If they had been given a rock by the demonstrator why didn't they just put it down and move away from the police lines when organisers and protestors tried to get them to do so instead of struggling with them. It is surprising that the Quebec police even admitted the men were theirs but the explanation sounds totally unconvincing given the video and statements from some of the protesters involved.

Quebec police defend undercover officers
Public safety minister rejects call for public inquiry
Last Updated: Friday, August 24, 2007 | 9:55 PM ET
CBC News
Quebec provincial police are standing behind three officers who went undercover during protests at the recent Montebello summit, saying the men weren't there to provoke demonstrators.

"At no time did the officers in question engage in provocation or incite anyone to commit violent acts," Insp. Marcel Savard told a news conference in Montreal on Friday.

The police admitted Thursday afternoon that three masked men caught on video Monday afternoon pushing toward a line of riot police, despite protesters' efforts to stop them, were the force's officers.

The protesters were demonstrating against an agreement called the Security and Prosperity Partnership that was being discussed by U.S. President George Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Montebello Monday and Tuesday.

Savard acknowledged that one of the officers was given a rock by protesters but did not use it.

"One of the extremists gave the rock to one of our police officers and he had a choice to make," Savard said. "He was asked by extremists to throw the rock at the police, but never had any intention of using it."

Continue Article

Protester Dave Coles on Friday refuted Savard's allegations.

"I would testify in a court of law that these guys were lying. They were pushing me around. They had rocks," said Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union.

"They were trying to incite violence. They were trying to get others to throw rocks at the store. It’s just a fabrication."

Day brushes off calls for inquiry
The police admission came after several days of accusations from the protesters and denials from police that the three men were agents trying to provoke a confrontation between protesters and police.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day continued to dismiss calls for a public inquiry on Friday, saying the RCMP has a formal complaints process.

"The thing that was interesting in this particular incident, three people in question were spotted by protesters because were not engaging in violence," Day said.

"They were being encouraged to throw rocks and they were not throwing rocks, it was the protesters who were throwing the rocks. That's the irony of this."

On Friday, politicians and protesters alike were still demanding answers about the incident.

Quebec Opposition public security critic Sylvie Roy, ADQ MNA for Lotbinière, said in an interview that the province's Public Security Minister Jacques Dupuis has to answer for the police actions.

Protester considers pressing charges
Coles, who tried to hold the masked men back, said he is considering pressing charges against the undercover officer who pushed him.

"Criminal acts were committed. They were shoving me and others," he said Friday. "We want an arm's-length independent inquiry of what's going on here."

A video posted on YouTube Tuesday showed three burly men dressed in black with bandanas over their faces pushing past Coles and other protesters in a designated protest area. One man was carrying a rock.

In the video, the protesters told the men to leave and put down the rock, and accused them of being agents provocateurs. The men broke through the police line and were handcuffed by police.

The video has been viewed 190,000 times since it was posted online on Tuesday.

The police later admitted the men were its officers, but said they were there to maintain order and were not trying to incite violence.

With files from the Associated Press