The unspoken rules for public servants engaging in civic affairs according to the left is as follows: political engagement is wrong, unless that political engagement favours the left, in which case it’s right.
This December it was broken by two Ontario-based police unions that were exasperated to see more hollow assurances about tackling crime in the fall economic statement. The Liberals promised, for the Nth time, to tighten bail rules and “ensure repeat, violent offenders are held accountable.” Sure, sure.
The Toronto Police Association called the statement “laughable” and called for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign.
“After nine years of doing nothing, you pick the moment when your government is descending into chaos to placate us with ‘proposals’? What a joke,” it wrote.
“Our members have lost faith in @JustinTrudeau’s government to do the right thing for the right reasons. Time to resign and leave these critically important public safety issues to someone else.”
The Durham Regional Police Association was next: “Empty promises & platitudes have very little meaning.… Violent crimes, gun offences & the lack of actual bail reform does nothing but endanger the public, Officers & society as a whole.”
It’s easy to see why frustration among police has cranked up to a bubbling boil in 2024. Waves of Liberal crime reform — whether to bring about harm reduction, decolonization, racial justice or whatever other shallow idea — has made their jobs worse.
For example, by ordering federal prosecutors to not prosecute any simple possession drug charges, the feds made it pointless for police to arrest vagrants doing drugs in parks. By cementing looser, court-made bail rules into the Criminal Code, the feds made it easier for what are often repeat offenders to walk free as they await their next trial.
And a slew of other changes, aimed at softening punishments for certain crimes to reduce the number of Black and Indigenous people in jail, preceded a massive spike in auto theft and gang-related crime in Toronto.
Now, it’s important to remember that the objectors speaking out against the Liberal government are police unions, not actual police services. That means, the government doesn’t have a hand in what they say or do: that’s up to them. Even so, observers on the left were angry to see any engagement of the sort.
One angry onlooker, Scott Piatkowski cried, “There’s a name for countries in which the police choose the government: A Police State.” A foolish hyperbole, to be sure: the police obviously don’t choose the government in Canada, and a police state probably wouldn’t allow employees to associate in labour unions outside the chain of command and voice concerns as a collective.
But more interesting was the source, a board member and former chair of the Waterloo Region District School Board. There, he worked to remove resource officers from schools in 2021 (violence in schools there is now on the rise) and supported the raising of pride flags at district schools. He even publicly accused a teacher of transphobia when she raised concerns about library offerings at a school board meeting — and led the board in censuring a trustee who supported that teacher.
Additional moral condemnation of the Toronto Police Association came from professor Shoshanna Jacobs at the University of Guelph: “Totally inappropriate.” Jacobs, you might vaguely remember, attracted attention in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of president-elect Donald Trump by tweeting, “When 4 inches really matters.”
On principle, I’d tend to agree with them — I’d rather groups like these stay out of politics. Their job isn’t to drive the bus; it’s to keep the bus running. Unions get a little more flexibility: they shouldn’t be silent in policy conversations, but they also risk losing credibility when they grandstand about politics more broadly, like demanding that heads of government resign. But it goes both ways, and after seeing political agitation from the left in nearly every public line of work, it’s hard to care when police do it in the opposite direction.
And yes, it’s been nonstop. Attend any Pride event and you will find booths and floats staffed by government departments and other public bodies: schools, nurses and, once again, police. These displays signal far more than acceptance — they also signal fealty to ideas such as gender ideology, intersectionality and the gods of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
As for the unions, they’ve done their share of politicking, too. The Canadian Union of Public Employees has somehow dedicated itself over the years to resolving Gaza and other international concerns that should be left to anyone else. In 2021, the Public Service Alliance of Canada counselled members against supporting the federal Conservatives, then led by Erin O’Toole.
And last year, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation lashed out at Premier Doug Ford for expressing the commonly held concern that schools have gone too far in pushing obscure gender identities onto children.
So, screw it. If some staff groups of Ontario’s police forces want to take the risk and speak out, I won’t be bothered by it this time. The left has absolutely no right to lecture anyone about keeping messy politics out of public service work. Consider it tit for tat.
National Post