New-age surveillance technology at CEO Summit: How can we prepare for the future of protesting?
by Sylphia Basak for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics
Editor's Note:
The following article reflects the views & analysis of the author. As with all opinion and essay submissions, the piece has been edited for clarity and reviewed carefully for factual accuracy, but the interpretations & arguments are the author’s own. The 44 North publishes an array of perspectives & voices to encourage and ensure thoughtful engagement with complex social, political, historical, and cultural issues.
"Deploying mass surveillance tactics, using intimidation and upgraded weapons, and isolating vulnerable people to specifically enact brutality on them is somehow never considered the inciting incident."
Amidst a jumping El Niño, an ongoing genocide and expanding war, following the summer of blazing forest fires and increasingly encroaching fascism, Prime Minister Mark Carney hosted a CEO summit last week. Over a hundred of the world's CEOs (including but not limited to BlackRock, Blackstone, JP Morgan, KKR and Barclays, as well as the CEO’s of Canada’s major banks—RBC, CIBC, BMO and Scotiabank) gathered to discuss the potential economic development of Canadian land. The "dealbook" for the summit centred on oil and gas, airports, infrastructure, data centers, and critical minerals. Reportedly, a total of 250 global asset managers managing a combined $120T in Assets Under Management will be in plenaries, backrooms, and the halls, working on deals without any input from the Canadian public.
Once promised back to its people by the same party, Carney now allegedly intends to broker deals involving selling Indigenous land to foreign interests—for ‘economic growth’ in the form of pipelines—while several communities, such as Grassy Narrows, continue to struggle obtaining clean water. Given an increasingly unstable economy, sociopolitical and climate collapse, a large public outcry ensued following the announcement of the summit. Indigenous communities have pointed to ongoing struggles for basic amenities on First Nations’ reservations, alongside the fact that several of the invited CEOs are primary architects of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and expanding war and occupation in West Asia. BlackRock, for example, is a New York City-based investment company with billions in assets in the leading weapons manufacturers across the world, including Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics. BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, is also an outspoken supporter of the apartheid regime in Israel, quoted as saying “the world needs to get back its moral compass” and that there’s “no moral equivalence between what is happening in the Middle East broadly versus what happened to Israel on Oct. 7.” (The People’s Forum).
Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset company, pledged $7 million in aid to Israel following the Al-Aqsa flood on October 7, 2023.
Banks such as Scotiabank and Barclays have been some of the top investors for Elbit, Israel’s leading weapons manufacturing company.
The summit took place near the Four Seasons Hotel and Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Largely organized by Indigenous leaders across Canada, over a thousand protestors marched and picketed outside. Speaking to CityNews, Kakeka ThunderSky, a member of Poplar River First Nation, travelled from Winnipeg to join the protest out of concern about fast-tracked environmental assessments and government policies that affect First Nations’ land:
“I came here … to confront Carney’s CEO summit to let them know that our lands and our resources are not on the chopping block for their profit and their benefit.”
Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief Na’Moks says Carney has used U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war to build momentum behind his major projects: “Canada is getting very good at blackmailing the public,” he said, citing the Prime Minister’s argument that Canada needs to build more major projects to protect itself from predatory U.S. trade policy. “That’s their story. Their story is false, the same way that they think that these projects will go on without your support, without our support,” said Na’Moks, who has organized opposition to pipeline projects in B.C. (CityNews)
On the other side of the picket, OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) and TPS (Toronto Police Service)—in what can only be described as an opulent display of the increasing police budget—appeared to be the majority of the Public Order arsenal.
Orange Hats, one of the local organizations for protest movement legal aid, walks me through a brief but non-exhaustive breakdown:
At least 10 large transport units, several of which had 6 antennas each; 2 bulbs, 2 fins, two antennas
At least 1 transport unit with a zoom-in facial recognition camera
At least 3 drones, 1 per chokepoint
8 mounted police (8 horses)
On the officers’ person:
Armored gloves
Flexi-cuffs
Gas masks
Tear gas
Pepper spray
Handguns
As an attendee, it was clear quite early in the demonstration that OPP and TPS were gearing up to make mass arrests. Strapping on their armoured gloves, which are designed specifically for maximum impact, and regularly switching out officers with mounted police in the back, the entire vicinity was walled off in a chokehold as police poised to attack anyone who gave them a “reason” to. In my experience as a protestor and journalist, Toronto Police inflict a particular type of violence in the name of public order. When protests escalate, the targets are too often the elderly, women, and disabled people. Activists speculate this targeting is a means of manufacturing consent, wherein a crowd jumps to the defence of a vulnerable person, thereby giving police justification for unleashing brutality on the rest of the crowd. (Cop Watch and Tkaronto Swine).
While on this occasion police were fortunately not given a “substantial enough” reason to enact violence, the tension across the barricades was palpable throughout the night. As the skies became darker and legal aid at various intervals braced for impact, it too became clear that protestors were angry enough to do more than a rallying cry, but were perhaps bound by the confines of the law and the lack of structural preparedness in Toronto for protestors to defy it.
This show of force will not be a one-off. It feels like a threat—a warning for what’s to come as the right to protest is increasingly restricted, and law enforcement is allowed to enforce their will with increasing impunity. To prepare ourselves, let’s revisit what a protest actually is.
What is a protest?
Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the right to protest is protected as with any democracy. Specifically under Section 2b and c, the right to protest and freedom of expression:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
b. freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.
c. Freedom of peaceful assembly.
The “right to self-defence” in the context of protest movements is still contested. However, throughout the course of history, surely we have long understood that law does not equate to morality. Haven’t we?
State violence is daunting to confront because it’s most often rendered invisible. Retaliation is what makes headlines and drives arrest numbers. We’ve been taught to view the defence of our communities as an ‘offensive’ form of violence. But deploying mass surveillance tactics, using intimidation and upgraded weapons, and isolating vulnerable people to specifically enact brutality on them is somehow never considered the inciting incident.
Discomfort appears to remain the Achilles’ heel of the Canadian consciousness, which is perhaps why there’s so much hesitation when it comes to conversations regarding the current sociopolitical climate—and the tangible steps communities can take to hold our politicians and law enforcement accountable for the systemic harm they inflict on our most vulnerable communities. We—everyday people, organizers, and policymakers—often fail to build the necessary infrastructure to protect our communities in the wake of economic, political, and environmental collapse because we’re afraid to address why we need to do so. That infrastructure will only become more necessary with time; it’s crucial we face our discomfort with addressing increasing right-wing austerity—it’s here in Canada, too, through federal and provincial budget cuts to public social services, anti-immigration policy and rhetoric, separatist movements in Alberta, anti-Indigenous environmental racism, rising police brutality rates, and increased protections for law enforcement. At what point will we reckon with the unsettling fact that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working as well as we want it to?
We’ve marched, cooperated with the police, picketed and flyered, called and emailed representatives; many politicians haven’t budged. Canadian political organization, in many ways, treats mobilization as the ceiling and then wonders why it fails to enact tangible change. Canadian consciousness, specifically Canadian settler consciousness, is focused on the idea of a perfect victim—a fallacy deliberately created to neuter radical political movements, described by twitch streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker:
“And that is the issue at the heart of the matter; people want perfect victims. Whether they be Black people engaging in the Civil Rights’ struggle, historically, whether it be the forces against apartheid in South Africa, whether it be the liberation struggle in Algeria. The expectation from the white moderate or the expectation from people who enjoy the order that exists in civilized society, is that people are not supposed to fight back and try to even match the intensity or the violence of the occupation, the colonial entity or the forces of police brutality that are defending white supremacy. So, that’s the reason why I make this distinction. I want people to start thinking; what would they do in that situation?”
We have precedent for successful protests that are deliberately erased from history curricula, such as the Wet'suwet'en pipeline protests or the Oka crisis. Our protest history is led most often by Indigenous organizers who continue to bear the brunt of the consequences with little to no support or outreach—even from self-proclaimed allies in larger urban populations. In the Canadian context, political freedom for all can only be achieved through an infrastructure of solidarity between indigenous and other minority (settler) communities in Canada.
Much of the hesitation, of course, surrounds the conversation of “violence.”
My argument here is not an advocacy for violence, but of preparation for self-defence and what it might need to look like. This is protected under Canadian and international law.
Doing anything that truly disrupts our world order—which keeps anyone with relative privilege comfortable enough—will feel disquieting. It should; the imperial core is global, with tendrils in our country, and therefore has long taken issue with sacrifice. In Canada, it’s too easy to look at our southern neighbours, thank the heavens we aren’t as bad and carry on as though the same virus that permeates America is not the bedrock of our nation as well.
Organizing doesn’t begin and end at riots. Organizing, as proven by the many revolutionary movements of eras past, includes political education, food, housing, childcare, legal aid, and medicine. And perhaps most importantly, it starts with an honest conversation about where we’re failing each other when it comes to holding the state accountable.
Over the next few weeks, there will be more marches, more rallies, and undoubtedly, there will be more police, more weapons, and more brutality. In itself, these actions may prove to be of little avail; the state doesn’t implement repression unless it perceives a threat. Like many Western governments, ours has recognized a shift in the cultural tide—that the systems on which they’ve built their power are collapsing.
I could feel the anticipation at the protest outside the summit—an uneasy readying for revolt not just across picket lines. And thus, we all face perhaps the most vital question of our time: How do we remain values-driven, together, and prepared to exceed their expectations?
Sylphia Basak is a journalist/writer and activist who uses a variety of mediums to convey the story she wants to tell. Her work prioritizes a decolonial lens, and seeks to counteract and analyze Western media and culture as a way of highlighting the primary contradictions of the current political climate.
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