by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
august 18, 2004
The Canadian association of Chiefs of Police (CaCP) has come out calling for a surcharge of 25 cents on all telephone and internet bills of Canadians. The idea originated with Edmonton Police Service Superintendent Tom Grue, who is a member of CaCP’s law amendments committee.
as technology increases and the police are seeing an increase in court approved wiretaps, electronic surveillance placed upon suspected criminal activity is becoming increasingly more complex and expensive, and the country’s police forces need more money in order to carry out such investigations.
There is a disagreement as to who should pay the freight. Bell Canada believes that the costs should be split between the police and telecommunications companies and such costs should not be passed on to the consumer. The police believe that the telecommunications companies and their customers should pay.
It is true that there is currently a surcharge imposed on telephone bills to pay for 911 services. But the 911 system directly benefits every person who has a telephone; it is part and parcel of the telephone service that they pay for. But there is a difference between the ability of individual citizens to reach the police quickly and asking individual telephone and internet users to directly fund specific investigations carried out by the police, even though these investigations concern telecommunications.
Policing is not private industry. Police don’t make a profit. The money that the police have to pay salaries and conduct investigations comes from government. Except in very rare cases such as the Ontario government’s profits on the sale of beer and liquor, the government isn’t in the business of making any money either. The government only has what it can manage to grab from the taxpayers. Police have no business going to private industry like telephone companies and internet providers and pressuring them to zap their customers for more money so that they can carry on investigations. as a Bell Canada spokesperson has pointed out, there are some people to whom an added surcharge (subject, of course to taxes) will constitute a hardship. Even if a very few people end up losing their telephone service, which means losing the immediate contact that they have to the police that are sworn to protect them, it is wrong.
at a time when all levels of government simply cannot stop spending and are always whining, in true Canadian fashion, about a shortage of funds and impending deficits, it is easy to understand why the cops want to look to consumers to pay their bills. But the police are a public service and it is not up to them to decide how much Canadians pay for the telephone and internet services.
There is another reason why it is understandable that the police want telecommunications customers to fund them directly. The federal government and many provincial and local governments rank fighting crime somewhere below constructing windmills and funding art exhibits for the transgendered. Battling violent crime, let alone wiretapping suspected money launderers, is simply not a priority with much of the political elite. The city of Toronto, which is governed by the 3 Ms (Martin, McGuinty and Miller) is a perfect example. But these leaders were democratically elected and with the possible exception of McGuinty, who has turned misleading Ontarians into an art form, we knew that they were indifferent to crime when we elected them.
If the government will not give the police enough money to properly conduct sophisticated electronic surveillance, then they just shouldn’t conduct it. and if the public doesn’t like it, perhaps they will think twice about it the next time they go to a polling station to cast their vote.
We are moving closer to being a police state when the police try and pressure private industry and their customers to pay for something that should be funded by the government.