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Security Theater: How Governments & Corporations Weaponize Surveillance

Updated: Apr 9

by Cleo Collins for The 44 North, Third-Place Winner of our Inaugural Essay Contest


Artwork by Logan Brewer
Artwork by Logan Brewer
"For many people, privacy in this modern age is unfeasible, forcing you to give over every aspect of your life to the tech conglomerates we use every day, leaving nothing we hold sacred safe."

Introduction


“If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” is a phrase thrown around far too often whenever privacy and security are discussed. It’s this saying that I believe is hurting us the most, not the fact that no matter where you go, you’re recorded and tracked, but that people are defending these changes—welcoming them with open arms and smiling faces.


Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen countries like the United Kingdom (UK), Australia, and the United States (U.S.) slowly turn into Orwellian surveillance states with every passing day. In the US, there are over 85 million surveillance cameras—approximately 2.4 cameras per 10 people (Bischoff, 2024). This article explores how the loss of privacy is impacting society, how governments and corporations exploit surveillance in the name of security, and how private companies like Flock Safety use artificial intelligence to surveil the masses.


The Erosion of Privacy


Across the world, people are being willingly surveilled. Not by governments or shady organizations, but by private corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, who use their vast reach to sell out consumers to advertisers, unknown third-party data brokers, and governments, increasing their bottom line (Chapman, 2024). Google tracks your movements via Google Maps, your interests through YouTube, and your conversations through Gmail. Apple and Microsoft harvest data from your devices, pinpointing your location, habits, and preferences. Amazon listens in on private conversations and builds profiles of what you might purchase and where you live using Alexa and Amazon Shopping. But these companies don’t just store their data. The result is a file on each one of us that tells the reader what we do, where we go, how to 

manipulate our behaviour, and predict our actions. No longer do governments have to rely on secret software to collect communications, emails, and browsing data; instead, they can simply issue court orders or exploit built-in backdoors to access the data we willingly hand over to these tech conglomerates. In 2025, there were 2,563 confirmed data breaches exposing sensitive information to criminals, and if that data isn’t stolen, it’s sold to advertisers who abuse it, targeting you with ads focused on every possible aspect of your life, from shopping habits to your emotional state, exploiting vulnerabilities.


What started as a place for academic discussion and freedom has turned into a veritable minefield of privacy violations. The internet has slowly become a place where, to remain anonymous, you must punish yourself with over-the-top security and a loss of convenience. For many people, privacy in this modern age is unfeasible, forcing you to give over every aspect of your life to the tech conglomerates we use every day, leaving nothing we hold sacred safe.


Facial recognition and AI-powered surveillance tools, such as those developed by companies like Amazon Ring, Clearview AI and Flock Safety, enable real-time tracking of individuals without their consent. False matches in these systems have already led to wrongful arrests, causing trauma to innocent men, women, and children. We’ve already seen police officers abuse these camera systems in the case of a Kansas police chief using Flock security cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend, and now, with ring doorbells partnering with Flock security, providing third parties, including the government, access to the security feeds around your house without your explicit consent. People can log where you went, who you talked to, and what you did. Although this is important, we must first delve deeper into the privacy losses we are seeing in the digital space.


Privacy in the digital space


As of October 2025, an estimated 6.04 billion people use the internet (an estimated 73.65% of all living humans), and many of them use products or services from Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, or Microsoft (DataReportal). In the case of Amazon, when its web service, called Amazon Web Services (AWS), temporarily went down, around 30% of the world’s internet experienced disruptions in some form or another, with many websites and apps stopping work altogether. To understand this issue, it is important to break down how Google, Amazon, and Apple exploit your data and strip away your privacy.


Google


Google is the third-largest tech company in the world, servicing billions of users every year. In fact, Google Chrome holds 90% of the global search market, and Chromium (Google’s open-source web browser project) serves as the building blocks for over 30 other web browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Samsung Internet. This dominance isn’t just about market share; it is about control. When one company becomes the gateway to the internet, it can set the rules for what privacy means. Google has set those rules, saying it can collect, analyze, and monetize your data often without your explicit consent.


Every interaction with Google products, whether it’s through Google Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, or Android, is fed into a vast surveillance machine. Google can track your location, search history, voice commands, emails, and even offline activity through apps and third-party websites. This data fills Google’s advertising empire, building detailed profiles on billions of people. And these profiles don’t just predict your behaviour; Google and its partners can and do use this data to influence your decisions and even manipulate your emotions.


In addition to influencing decisions, Google has a long track record of privacy violations, dating back to 2016, when it quietly dropped its ban on personally identifiable information in its DoubleClick ad service, allowing them to combine web browsing records obtained through DoubleClick with data that they gather from their other services. In recent years, Google was found tracking users even when location data was turned off, secretly collecting data from millions of Chrome users in Incognito mode, and misleading users about how their data was used for targeted advertising.


Amazon


Amazon’s services don’t stop at selling products; they monetize your habits, preferences, geolocation data, and even your voice. Ring cameras help fuel surveillance around the world; Amazon created a neighbourhood watch surveillance system and partnered with Flock Security alongside over 2,000 police departments to share footage without explicit consent. Meanwhile, Alexa, the voice assistant installed in millions of homes, was caught storing children's voice recordings indefinitely and refusing to delete them after parents requested it (Federal Trade Commission, 2024). Beyond that, Amazon’s AWS cloud services have suffered multiple security breaches, exposing sensitive customer data due to lax security. Over the past few years, Amazon has been shifting their business model towards turning your private life into profit, making it a cornerstone of the corporate surveillance economy.


Apple


Apple is often referred to as a bastion of privacy because it’s difficult to hack into its devices, but privacy from malicious actors doesn’t mean complete privacy from everyone, and they routinely harvest and sell users’ personal data. In 2021, it was revealed that some iPhone apps listed on the App Store were collecting and selling data without explicit consent, while Apple’s own apps, such as Siri, were found recording private conversations without informing users (Belanger, 2025). While Apple has introduced stricter guidelines for the App Store, its closed ecosystem and control over app distribution raise concerns about true transparency. Additionally, the company’s refusal to fully embrace end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups further highlights its selective commitment to privacy, prioritizing law enforcement access over user security.


When Countries Weaponize Mass Surveillance


Given the many privacy violations companies commit, it’s equally critical to expose how governments exploit surveillance to control their citizens. Across the world, we’ve seen what happens when governments overstep their boundaries, using mass surveillance not just as a tool for security, but as a mechanism for social control. From targeting political dissidents to suppressing marginalized communities, these systems are used to monitor, manipulate, and intimidate.


The United States of America


What was once the land of the free is now the second-most-surveilled country in the world, where the average person is photographed over 75 times a day. This surveillance infrastructure was initially exposed in 2013 when Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, leaked classified documents revealing the U.S. government’s global mass surveillance programs. Tools like PRISM and XKeyscore allowed the NSA to collect and monitor private communications of individuals worldwide, including foreign leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. These revelations demonstrated the extent to which privacy had already eroded under the guise of national security (DiLascio, 2024; Bonifaz, 2024; History, 2018).


Since then, surveillance has only intensified. Amazon’s partnership with Flock Safety now provides governments and law enforcement with access to footage from Ring doorbell cameras, enabling real-time tracking of individuals from the moment they leave their homes. This system, combined with data from companies like MasterCard—which sells cardholders’ transaction data to third parties (Brooks, 2023)—allows the U.S. government to map citizens’ movements, purchases, and habits. Such surveillance is already being used by police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to target marginalized communities, enabling racial profiling, wrongful detentions, and family separations under the pretense of national security.


China


It’s no secret that China is the most surveilled country in the world. With over 700 million surveillance cameras, there is one camera for every two people. China’s surveillance state is not just about monitoring; it is about control and oppression. The countries’ mass surveillance has easily enabled racial prosecution and abuse. Nowhere is this more evident than in the racial persecution of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The Chinese government uses biometric surveillance, phone tracking, and predictive policing to monitor, detain, and imprison Uyghurs en masse, often without trial or due process. Reports from human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, reveal that surveillance data is used to justify forced labour, re-education camps, and family separations, turning Xinjiang into a mass-surveilled open-air prison (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Amnesty International, 2021).


The implications of China’s surveillance model extend far beyond its borders. By exporting its AI-powered surveillance technology to other authoritarian regimes, China is helping to build a global infrastructure of repression. The same tools used to oppress Uyghurs—facial recognition, social credit systems, and mass data collection—are now being adopted by governments worldwide, normalizing the erosion of privacy and human rights. What begins as a tool for “public safety” quickly becomes a weapon for silencing dissent, targeting minorities, and crushing political opposition.


How to protect yourself


Understanding how companies are selling your data is the first step. The second is learning how to protect yourself and gain control.


Start by reducing your digital footprint. Deleting social media accounts and removing unnecessary photos from cloud services limits the data corporations can collect. Switching to privacy-focused tools can also help: Browsers like Mullvad, Hardened Firefox, and Tor block trackers and resist fingerprinting, making it harder for companies to monitor your activity. Using VPNs will shield your activity from prying eyes, while gradually replacing Google services with privacy-focused, open-source alternatives can significantly reduce your exposure without sacrificing usability. While achieving full digital anonymity is near impossible, it should not dissuade you from trying. Gradually withdrawing from large tech companies will greatly improve your privacy and make it harder for them to track you.


Conclusion


The erosion of privacy is not hypothetical—it’s happening now. Governments and corporations, under the guise of security and convenience, have constructed a surveillance infrastructure that tracks, profiles, and manipulates individuals on an unprecedented scale. From the mass data collection of tech giants to surveillance states like China and the U.S., the consequences are clear: unchecked monitoring leads to abuse, discrimination, and the loss of fundamental freedoms.


Canada is not yet at the extreme end of this spectrum, but the trajectory is alarming. Each new camera and normalization of privacy violations pushes us closer to a future where anonymity is extinct.

About the Author

Cleo Collins is a high-school student from Ontario who is passionate about privacy, cybersecurity, and robotics. They enjoy building technology that makes a difference while keeping security and ethics at the core. When they’re not working on new ideas, they can be found spending time outdoors camping or hiking.


References

The Pathogen of Perception: Quantifying the Multi-Dimensional Cost of Medical Misinformation

Updated: Feb 23

by Jason Wang for The 44 North

Winner of our Inaugural Essay Contest


A doctor crossing their arms in front of a purple background with cartoon vaccine syringes. Their face is covered by anti-vaccination social media posts.
A doctor crossing their arms in front of a purple background with cartoon vaccine syringes. Their face is covered by anti-vaccination social media posts.
"The cost of misinformation shows up in obituaries and hospital bills. The value of a scientifically literate society shows up in the deaths that never happen and the crises we prevent before they spiral. My grandmother is alive today because accurate information eventually reached her through the noise. How many others could we save if we made sure it reached them first?"

In the Canadian Armed Forces, we're taught that the most dangerous threat is often the one that remains hidden. Today, that danger is no longer confined to a physical battlefield; it has taken root in the digital spread of medical misinformation.


As a Grade 12 student aspiring for a future in neurosurgery, I see misinformation not merely as a social ill, but as a clinical hazard. It behaves less like an abstract idea and more like a pathogen, producing tangible harms that strain public health systems, burden the economy, and undermine collective safety. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, my own grandmother—a woman who survived the 2003 SARS outbreak in China and understood the visceral reality of respiratory illness—found herself paralyzed by skepticism. Despite her lived history, the sheer volume of digital misinformation regarding vaccine safety led her to abhor the very medical breakthrough designed to protect her.


It was only through exhaustive persuasion and the presentation of rigorous clinical data that she begrudgingly consented to immunization. Her hesitation was not born of ignorance, but of a systemic failure in information integrity. It was through this experience that I realized medical misinformation acts as an informational pathogen that imposes a tripartite cost: biological, economic, and societal, ultimately illustrating that the erosion of scientific literacy is a tangible threat to human life and the stability of the healthcare system.


Misinformation is not a victimless exchange of ideas; it has a direct, pathological impact on human physiology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers attempted to quantify the death toll attributable to vaccine refusal. A 2022 study published in The Lancet estimated that COVID-19 vaccination prevented approximately 14.4 million deaths globally in the first year of availability (Watson et al., 2022). Working backward from that figure, the Kaiser Family Foundation calculated that between June 2021 and March 2022, at least 234,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States could have been prevented if unvaccinated individuals had received the vaccine (Amin et al., 2022). These were not deaths caused by vaccine scarcity, logistical failures, or overwhelmed hospitals. Medical intervention existed and was available. What failed was the transmission of accurate information to the populations who needed it most.


The pathway from misinformation to mortality operates through two distinct but interconnected mechanisms. At the individual level, false beliefs about vaccine safety leave people vulnerable to severe disease outcomes. COVID-19 disproportionately threatens specific populations: the elderly, individuals with underlying conditions like diabetes or cardiovascular disease, and the immunocompromised. When a 70-year-old diabetic encounters claims that "natural immunity is superior" or that vaccines alter DNA, they're being steered toward a preventable death. The data from 2021 is unambiguous: unvaccinated individuals died and were at higher risk of infection from COVID-19 at rates 13.9 and 53.2 times higher than their vaccinated counterparts, respectively (Johnson et al., 2022). That mortality gap represents actual bodies, not abstract risk calculations.


At the population level, vaccine hesitancy degrades what epidemiologists term “herd immunity, the phenomenon where high vaccination coverage protects even those who cannot be vaccinated by suppressing overall transmission. Herd immunity requires crossing specific thresholds: for measles, approximately 95% of the population must be immune to prevent sustained outbreaks (Osman et al., 2022). When misinformation depresses vaccination rates below these critical levels, diseases that had been eliminated for decades resurface.


Canada's experience is instructive. Between 2019 and 2023, routine childhood vaccination coverage dropped from 90% to 82% (Jacobsen, 2025). In November 2025, Canada lost its measles elimination status after 27 years. Canada recorded over 5,100 cases in a single year (Soucheray, 2025). Two infants died after contracting the virus in utero, before they could be vaccinated. The virus had not mutated into a more dangerous form. The vaccine had not failed. The only variable that changed was information integrity. The cruelty of this dynamic lies in its distribution of harm. The individuals who bear the biological cost are often not the ones who rejected the medical intervention. The infants who died in Canada's measles outbreak made no decisions about vaccine safety. The immunocompromised cancer patient who contracts COVID-19 from an unvaccinated colleague did not choose vulnerability. The child who develops measles because their parents believed discredited claims about vaccine-induced autism did not consent to that infection. When misinformation convinces one person to refuse vaccination, the biological consequences radiate outward, creating community-wide vulnerabilities that extend far beyond individual choice.


Beyond direct biological harm, misinformation creates a preventable fiscal crisis for healthcare systems built on the principle of prevention. The economic logic of vaccination is straightforward: a small upfront cost prevents far larger expenses later.


During the COVID-19 pandemic, this logic played out in real time. Between June and November 2021, hospitalizations of unvaccinated adults cost the U.S. healthcare system approximately $13.8 billion, according to research by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation (Farrenkopf, 2022). That figure represents just five months in a single country. The vaccines were free to patients. The hospital stays were not. ICU beds, ventilators, weeks of round-the-clock nursing care, and post-discharge rehabilitation drove costs that dwarfed what prevention would have required. Each COVID-19 hospitalization in Canada averaged roughly $20,000 for non-ICU care and exceeded $50,000 for ICU treatment, according to CIHI (CBC News, 2021). Across hundreds of thousands of largely preventable hospitalizations, the resulting economic waste becomes staggering. The Commonwealth Fund estimated that COVID-19 vaccination prevented approximately $900 billion in U.S. healthcare costs during the first year of vaccine availability alone (Schneider et al., 2022).


The opportunity cost of this spending is as important as the headline numbers. The National Cancer Institute operates on an annual budget of about $6.9 billion. The $13.8 billion spent on preventable COVID hospitalizations in five months could have funded nearly two years of cancer research. It could have paid the annual salaries of roughly 138,000 nurses or purchased more than 2,700 MRI machines, substantially reducing diagnostic delays. Instead, those resources were consumed treating a disease for which effective, free prevention already existed.


Canada experienced a similar dynamic. Fraser Institute estimated that the Canadian government spent approximately $359.7 billion responding to COVID-19, with an estimated 25% (89.9 billion) wasted (Fuss, Hill, 2023). While not all of that spending was avoidable, vaccine hesitancy accounted for billions that could otherwise have modernized hospital infrastructure, expanded mental-health services, or reduced surgical backlogs that left tens of thousands of Canadians waiting in pain.


Outbreak response costs further expose the inefficiency created by misinformation. When vaccine-preventable diseases resurge, public health systems must mobilize extensive emergency operations: contact tracing, laboratory testing, isolation protocols, and redeployment of clinical staff. Contact tracing a single measles case can cost between $10,000 and $50,000 (Hyle et al., 2018). A 2018–2019 measles outbreak in New York involving 649 cases cost the city approximately $8.4 million in emergency response alone (about $12,900 per case), excluding hospital treatment (Zucker et al., 2020). By comparison, the two-dose MMR vaccine costs roughly $100 (Antoneshyn, 2025). These are not abstract inefficiencies; they are real budget line items and real staff hours diverted from other priorities.


As immunologist Dawn Bowdish has noted, cuts to public-health funding, the lack of a national vaccine registry, physician shortages, and widespread misinformation reinforce one another. Budget cuts weaken the infrastructure needed to counter misinformation. Misinformation lowers vaccination rates. Outbreaks then consume far more funding than the original cuts saved. This reveals something fundamental about how healthcare systems function. Canada’s universal healthcare model rests on an implicit social contract: individuals accept evidence-based prevention, and the system provides care when prevention fails. Misinformation breaks that contract. An unvaccinated patient occupying an ICU bed with preventable disease displaces care for heart-attack victims, trauma patients, or people awaiting surgery. The burden extends beyond money to system-wide constraints: staff burnout, delayed procedures, and overcrowded emergency rooms. Misinformation does not merely waste resources; it degrades the basic capacity of healthcare systems to function.


The biological and economic costs of misinformation ultimately converge in a third dimension: the breakdown of collective capacity to respond to shared threats. As a member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves, I have been trained to recognize that mission success depends on accurate intelligence. When field units receive false information about enemy positions or terrain conditions, operations fail, and soldiers die. Public health operates under the same constraint.


Populations cannot mount effective responses to disease outbreaks if they cannot agree on how diseases spread or whether medical interventions work. This is not merely a problem of political disagreement. It represents a fundamental breakdown in the social infrastructure required for coordinated action during crises.


The erosion is measurable. Research by Obohwemu et al. found that lack of confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, and collective responsibility have all been highlighted as barriers to vaccination uptake among parents to different degrees (Obohwemu et al., 2022). The effect persisted months after exposure, suggesting that misinformation creates lasting changes in trust rather than temporary confusion.


A 2021 study by Loomba et al. published in Nature examined the impact of misinformation on COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 5,000 participants in the United Kingdom. Participants exposed to anti-vaccine misinformation showed a 6.2 percentage point decrease in willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, and exposure to misinformation emphasizing vaccine side effects reduced stated vaccine acceptance by 6.4 percentage points (Loomba et al., 2021). The effects were largest among individuals who were initially unsure about vaccination, demonstrating how misinformation specifically targets and exploits uncertainty.


The consequences extend beyond immediate health decisions. During February 2022, protests opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates blocked downtown Ottawa for three weeks, disrupted international trade at border crossings, and required the invocation of the Emergencies Act for the first time since its creation in 1988 (Government of Canada, 2022). The protesters' core belief, that vaccine requirements represented government overreach rather than public health necessity, had been cultivated by years of online misinformation about vaccine safety and efficacy.


Regardless of one's position on specific policy choices, the event demonstrated a critical failure: a substantial portion of the population had become unreachable by conventional public health communication. They were not evaluating evidence about transmission dynamics or hospital capacity. They were operating within a constructed narrative where vaccination itself was the threat. This matters because complex modern societies require institutional trust to function. Climate adaptation, pandemic preparedness, food safety regulation, and infrastructure maintenance all depend on public willingness to defer to technical expertise on questions beyond individual competence. When misinformation convinces populations that expert consensus is either fraudulent or politically motivated, that deference collapses. The immediate result may be preventable deaths during a pandemic. The long-term result is a society that has lost the ability to protect itself from foreseeable dangers.


Misinformation does not merely kill people in the present. It disables the mechanisms societies need to prevent future deaths.


My grandmother eventually got her COVID-19 vaccination, but it took weeks of persuasion and countless conversations before she trusted the science over what she had read online. Millions of others never made it to that point. The 234,000 preventable deaths in the United States, the return of measles in Canada after 27 years of elimination, the billions spent treating diseases we already knew how to prevent—these numbers tell a straightforward story about what happens when people cannot tell truth from fiction. Misinformation kills people, drains resources that could save other lives, and breaks down our ability to respond when the next crisis arrives. But the same networks that carry lies can also carry truth when people know how to recognize the difference.


The answer is not censorship. It is teaching people how to think critically about health information, the same way we teach them to read or do algebra. My generation has grown up watching misinformation kill people we know. We understand how it spreads because we have seen it happen in real time. That experience can become our greatest defense if we treat scientific literacy as essential to navigating modern life safely. The cost of misinformation shows up in obituaries and hospital bills. The value of a scientifically literate society shows up in the deaths that never happen and the crises we prevent before they spiral.


My grandmother is alive today because accurate information eventually reached her through the noise. How many others could we save if we made sure it reached them first?


About the Author

Jason Wang is a Grade 12 Senior student at St. Peter’s Catholic Secondary School in Peterborough, Ontario. He currently works as a lifeguard, swim instructor, piano teacher and recently, an Army reservist. He wishes to pursue a career in medicine and neuroscience/neurosurgery in the future. He is also the creator of “The Axonora Initiative,” a recent YouTube channel focusing on tackling misinformation.”


Connect with Jason on personal Instagram: @jimjamwong08 or through The Axonora Initiative @axonorainitiative



References

Watching Minneapolis from Canada: When Power Stops Explaining Itself​

by Gillian Smith-Clark for The 44 North

Editor-in-Chief


Canadian Border Inspection sign on a fence
Canadian Border Inspection sign on a fence
"Young Canadians, in particular, are acutely aware of this permeability. Many consume U.S. news in real time, encounter the same viral footage, and experience the same unease when democratic norms appear fragile. The fear is not that Canada is identical to the United States, but that no democracy is immune to erosion—especially when power begins to justify itself rather than explain itself." ​​

“Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders among us,

but those among us who never look within.

Fear not those without papers,

but those without conscience.”

—“For Alex Jeffrey Pretti, Murdered by I.C.E., January 24, 2026”


In the wake of at least 32 people dying in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025, came the deadly killings of two civilians—Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti—in early 2026. The Orwellian echoes in the Trump administration’s response to both deaths reverberated far beyond the borders of the United States.


In Canada, and elsewhere, the reaction has been a mixture of rage, grief, disbelief, and deep unease. Not only because lives were lost, but because of how they were lost—and which lives were publicly named, mourned, or quietly omitted. Conflicting official accounts, disputed video evidence, victim-blaming, and the rapid hardening of narratives left little room for accountability, introspection, or restraint.


What has also gone largely unexamined is who has been missing from much of the coverage. Keith Porter, a Black man, and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant, were also killed in the context of immigration enforcement—yet their names have been far less widely reported. Whether through indifference or intention, this silence compounds the violence itself. It suggests that some deaths demand explanation, while others are simply absorbed into the background noise of enforcement.


What makes these events so unsettling is not simply that violence occurred; it is what they suggest about a broader shift in how state power is exercised and justified. When lethal force is deployed against civilians in the name of law enforcement, and transparency and accountability lag behind, trust erodes quickly—not only within the communities directly affected, but across borders. Minneapolis, in this sense, is not an isolated flashpoint. It is a critical juncture.


Over the past several years, immigration enforcement in the United States has become increasingly militarized, with expanded authority, aggressive tactics, and limited public oversight. Federal agencies tasked with civil enforcement now operate with levels of force once reserved for national security operations. At the same time, rapid expansion and accelerated hiring have raised troubling questions about training, qualifications, and oversight. These shifts have unfolded gradually, often justified as necessary responses to crisis or disorder. But their cumulative effect is profound: the normalization of state violence in spaces where civilians expect protection, not confrontation.


For Canadians watching closely, this raises uncomfortable questions. Canada often defines itself in contrast to the United States — as more restrained, more human-rights-focused, more humane in its approach to immigration and policing. And in many respects, those distinctions matter. But proximity matters too. The two countries share deeply intertwined roots: colonialism, families, economies, media ecosystems, and political currents. What happens in the U.S. does not stay there—not culturally, not economically, and not psychologically.


Young Canadians, in particular, are acutely aware of this permeability. Many consume U.S. news in real time, encounter the same viral footage, and experience the same unease when democratic norms appear fragile. The fear is not that Canada is identical to the United States, but that no democracy is immune to erosion—especially when power begins to justify itself rather than explain itself.


This broader sense of rupture was articulated by Mark Carney in his recent address at the World Economic Forum. Speaking to an audience grappling with global instability, Carney argued that the assumptions underpinning the postwar international order—shared rules, dependable allies, and a baseline commitment to human rights—can no longer be taken for granted. The world, he suggested, has entered a period in which power is more frequently asserted than constrained.


In that context, Carney called on so-called “middle power” countries like Canada to rethink their posture—not by retreating into isolation, and not by clinging uncritically to old alignments, but by building strategic autonomy: the capacity to act independently in defence of national interests while remaining anchored to core values such as human rights, sovereignty, and the rule of law. He acknowledged the understandable impulse toward protectionism, but cautioned:


“A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. And there is another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transnationalism will become harder to replicate.”


Strategic autonomy is often misunderstood as a turn inward. In reality, it is about resilience and choice. It means diversifying partnerships so that no single relationship becomes a point of vulnerability. It means ensuring that economic security and diplomatic decisions reflect democratic values rather than sheer necessity. And it means strengthening institutions at home so that rights are not contingent on political mood or external pressure.


The relevance of this framework becomes clearer when viewed alongside events like those in Minneapolis. When even close allies act unpredictably—or in ways that challenge shared norms—alignment alone is no longer sufficient. Despite the claims of a vocal minority, values cannot be outsourced, nor can accountability be assumed. Strategic autonomy, seen in this light, is not about distancing Canada from the world, but about ensuring that engagement does not come at the cost of founding principles.


Why This Matters Now

Borders don’t stop instability.

Events in the U.S.—especially those involving state violence and civil liberties—reverberate outward and cross borders. For Canadians, geographic and cultural proximity means exposure, whether we welcome it or not.


Values require action.

Human rights and accountability depend on both institutions and individuals willing to defend them, particularly when norms begin to erode elsewhere.


Strategic autonomy is about protection, not isolation.

It is the ability to act with clarity and independence in a world where power is increasingly transactional.


Young people are inheriting this landscape.

The generation coming of age now faces overlapping crises—democratic backsliding, climate instability, and rising state coercion. Understanding how power operates is no longer abstract. It is urgent and personal.

 

Final Thoughts

What is unfolding in Minneapolis is not simply an American story, nor is it one Canadians can afford to watch with detached concern. It is a reminder that rights often erode quietly before they disappear loudly—and that proximity to power does not guarantee protection from its excesses.


It is also a moment to think seriously about what both our shared and individual values actually are. A starting point may be the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reminds us that “the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”


Canada’s task in this moment is neither complacency nor moral superiority, but clarity: recognizing that human rights, accountability, and dignity must be actively defended, even when doing so is uncomfortable or costly.


Strategic autonomy, as Carney argued, is ultimately about responsibility—the responsibility to choose principle over convenience, to resist the normalization of violence, and to insist that power remains answerable to the people it claims to serve.


That work is unfinished. It must not be abdicated. And it belongs, in different ways, to all of us.

We can all insist on naming what institutions often erase—the people who disappear not only from life, but from memory:


“Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,

crouches our power, the howl where we begin,

straining upon the edge of the crooked crater

of the worst of what we’ve been.”

—“For Renée Nicole Good,”

killed by I.C.E., January 7, 2026


​


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