When people are having members of their community kidnapped at graduation ceremonies, hearing stories of secret police trying to enter elementary schools to abduct 1st graders, that affects you. Masked agents of the state who hide their identities are routinely disappearing people, and when communities respond to protect each other from abduction, or protest these monstrous actions, the police show up to disperse them so the kidnappers can do what they came to do. They routinely attack people unprovoked.

If you have never been to a protest where the cops decided to escalate, you cannot know how crystal clear the barbarity becomes. These cops have been pelting peaceful people with pepper balls, tear gas, concussion grenades, and baton rounds. According to a study, those “less lethal” rubber rounds permanently injure ~15% of the people hit by them. 3% are killed, eventually dying to injuries sustained.

Here’s a video of someone being shot with one point blank for asking an officer to identify himself, who refuses to do so. Here’s a police horse being used to trample a man that is already subdued and surrounded.

The other thing to understand is that while the outrageously ghoulish shit ICE and other state bodies have been getting up to, this situation with the police has been the status quo for a very long time. The same forces have been doing this shit to virtually every form of protest for ages. These are the same people that are responsible for the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a for-profit prison industry, and contracts to exploit incarcerated labour.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the situation is already incredibly violent, that violence has just been normalized, and people are literally trying to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped by the state. Communities have been experiencing relentless institutional and systemic oppression for generations. Appealing to the conscience of people brutalizing and kidnapping targeted groups on behalf of the state is a fool’s errand, they clearly have none.

Asking people to remain completely peaceful is to ask them to sit back and watch their neighbors disappear. It’s to ask them to passively watch as more people get subjected to greater levels of violence, to show up and be beaten themselves for daring to resist the expansion of fascism. Burnt Waymos and shattered glass can be replaced, rebuilt. Objects are not people, and it’s overwhelmingly cops that have been damaging people.

I am not advocating for violence, but I think every person understands the innate urge to rebel against oppression. Whatever shape that takes, people that are not putting their bodies on the line do not get to tell those that are what to do.

There are also people who have no choice in the matter, their bodies are on the line either way because state agents have orders to take control of them in some way or other. Before you think to tell people what they should or should not do, take a moment to ask yourself how it would sound if it was you and yours in that position.

Beyond that, expecting that years of passivity will somehow pay off is absurd. If it worked, the situation would be getting better over time, not worse. This regime is going to escalate no matter what, it’s already deporting dissidents and shipping innocent people off to foreign concentration camps. They’re already actively trying to revoke citizenship from all sorts, unilaterally criminalizing completely law-abiding people overnight.

We know where this road leads. Whatever actions people take to shut it down, history will be on their side.

Some noteworthy excerpts:

While Canadian soldiers fought an anti-fascist war overseas, at home the state targeted the left for repression far more than the Canadian fascist movement. During the Second World War, four-fifths of those prosecuted for subversive literature in Canada were communists, the majority of banned groups were communist organizations, and most of the people arrested for violating the Defence of Canada Regulations were leftists, not fascists. Many of those interned were Ukrainian or otherwise Slavic in origin, and many were Jewish. The Canadian state also confiscated property belonging to working-class Ukrainian organizations and gave it to Ukrainian groups with right-wing or even pro-fascist sympathies.

Today, leftists and progressives in Canada continue to endure overtly political policing, such as when they organize against Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. In November 2024, a militarized unit from the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) raided the home of Palestine solidarity activist Charlotte Kates. In a massive show of force, VPD officers arrived in an armoured police carrier, fired flashbang grenades, broke down her door, and reportedly seized her computers and phones. The previous month, Ottawa had declared Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, of which Kates is international coordinator, a “terrorist entity.”

As the Canadian left continues to mobilize, we should understand ourselves as part of a century-old tradition in Canada, a tradition that has always opposed genocide, fascism, and the capitalist system – and has always faced police repression and accusations of “un-Canadian” behaviour for doing so.

[…]

As Israel commits a genocide against Palestinians, the Canadian state is using its repressive powers to brutalize and criminalize those who oppose this indiscriminate slaughter. In May 2024, the VPD violently dispersed a rail blockade. That same month, police in riot gear used tear gas and batons to repress a street protest in Montreal. Meanwhile a secretive team in the Toronto Police Service’s Hate Crimes Unit, known as Project Resolute, has specifically targeted Palestine solidarity activists, recalling the Red Squads of early 20th-century Canada. Under Project Resolute, officers have executed nighttime raids and ransacked activists’ homes.

Many Canadians have been fired or denied work for their opposition to Canadian state policy. Meanwhile Thomas Carrique, Ontario Provincial Police commissioner, directly blamed immigration for the spike in protest activity. “Through immigration,” he said, “thousands of people, who may have had an orientation towards violence as a means of expression or activism, continue to arrive in Canada every year.”

The overtly political slant of 1940s policing remains to this day. A particularly illustrative example is the so-called “Freedom Convoy.” Organized by right-wingers in January 2022, the Convoy and its associated protests caused billions of dollars in economic losses, but police did not intervene for three weeks. By contrast, police waited just 16 hours before attacking the student encampment for Palestine at the University of Calgary, one day before clearing the York University encampment, and a few days before destroying the University of Alberta encampment, even though campuses are generally isolated from the city centre and important urban infrastructure.

Wechat has over a billion active users, it’s the world’s only super app. There are probably tens of thousands of users in Montreal alone. This is like saying “anybody using whatapp is already compromised” it’s ridiculous.

Yeah it would have been more appropriate to say “Chinese-speaking audiences” on my part, especially given the concern seems to be that it was aimed at Canadian voters who can read/speak the language.

The second link was definitely the one I was more referring to when talking about editorializing and characterizations, it’s more emotive language overall but it still doesn’t really say anything wrong or misleading. Disagreeing with the characterization could be reasonable, but the tone of it is like any sensationalized news aggregator blog or social media account anywhere else in the world. Like we don’t call it misinformation when people post a video called “[Public Figure] DESTROYED in HEATED DEBATE!” even if we roll our eyes at the language, and similarly any kind of social media format lends itself to catchier and more dramatic descriptions.

The lack of attribution could actually be the real source of concern. It’s possible there’s some disagreements on wording in a translation, or that not having direct links to sources is viewed as misleading but again… it’s not hard to see that’s exactly how just about any social media news account tends to function these days.

It just honestly feels like this is the Canadian government grasping at straws, especially given that this is being treated like overt election interference from the Chinese government. Given that there is a much more present and obvious concern about US interference. Most of our media outside the CBC and all of our social media is directly owned by US corporations that are backing the fascist threatening to annex us. I don’t understand why the fed and CSIS keep issuing these warnings about often dubious claims of malicious state actors from elsewhere, it’s maddening.

The funny thing is that you can actually check the official Canadian source right here that links to two posts directly (one and two) and if you use some browser translation you can see exactly what the articles actually say which is… literally just a news update for Chinese audiences offering a summary of Carney’s past behavior and achievements. It’s not even really negative, if anything it’s just vaguely uncertain.

I have read them both twice and am not really really finding any false narratives to speak of. The only real editorializing is in portrayal of current exchanges between Trump, Carney, and Trudeau, and if we’re going to consider any kind of characterization of foreign political leaders as somehow pushing a false narrative then we should probably take a look at how all our own media reports on the US, EU, and elsewhere ourselves.

Granted, I don’t speak mandarin and there is always a possibility that there are more skewed statements that are being lost in translation, but I don’t really understand why these particular posts summarizing Canadian electoral politics for Chinese readers on wechat are somehow some kind of election interference.

A snippet, from one of the posts that is being framed as some kind of attack on Carney, which is actually titled “The United States is facing a tough prime minister from Canada”:

Who is Mark Carney? What is his campaign message? Can he lead Canada through the current crisis?

Carney was born in a small town called Fort Smith in the northwest region of Canada. His mother was a teacher and his father was the principal of a local high school. He later became a professor of education at the University of Alberta. Carney, who grew up in an academic family, originally dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, but changed his mind after being admitted to the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He admitted: “I came to Harvard from Canada with a large student loan, and the most effective way to repay the loan was to become a banker.”

After that, Carney graduated from Harvard University and Oxford University, spent 13 years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and then returned to Canada to start a public service.

In 2008, Carney, who was only 42 years old, became the governor of the Bank of Canada and was praised for his quick and effective response to the financial crisis. Carney then moved to London to take charge of the Bank of England, the central bank of the United Kingdom, becoming the first foreign governor in the bank’s 300-year history.

The British media called him a “rock star economist” for his series of modern reforms to the traditional Bank of England.

During his tenure in the UK, Carney helped the UK through the turbulent period after Brexit and was called “the only adult in the room.” But at the same time, Carney also caused controversy for repeatedly warning about the economic risks of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and making remarks about the risks of climate change to financial markets.

After leaving his post as Governor of the Bank of England in 2020, Carney served as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Chairman of Bloomberg, and Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management.

His professional achievements have earned Carney a large support base among Canadian Liberal MPs.

Earlier, Canadian Foreign Minister Joly said Carney was “capable of dealing with major crises”. Canadian Environment Minister Guilbeault believed that Carney was best suited to “manage” US President Trump and lead the Canadian economy to achieve energy transformation in the coming years.