Vol. 10 No. 10 (October 2000) pp. 551-554.

PEPPER IN OUR EYES: THE APEC AFFAIR by W. Wesley Pue (Editor). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000. 241 pp. $32.95. ISBN 0-7748-0779- 2.

Reviewed by Thomas M. J. Bateman, Department of Political Studies, Augustana University College, Camrose, Alberta, Canada.

Canada's national pastime, aside from hockey, is to fret over the country's identity. However, Canadians will, when pressed, probably say that Canada is a decent place to live in and that a reason for this is that Canada stands for human rights. Indeed, tributes to the recently deceased former Prime Minster Pierre Elliott Trudeau frequently declare that his signal achievement was the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian Constitution in 1982.

Undoubtedly, the protection of rights and freedoms has found its way into the Canadian identity. Furthermore, Canada's international reputation is associated with the advancement of the global human rights agenda. Canadians are the peacekeepers, the supporters of the UN, the heralds of the International Criminal Court, the spearheads of the land mine treaty -- Canadians are the global nice guys.

However, there is another side to the Canadian global profile. Canada is one of the most economically exposed countries on the planet. A surprising share of its economic product is tied up in international trade. Because Canada is the mouse snuggled up to the American elephant, the Canada- U. S. trade relationship is among the closest and deepest of any two countries. Various Canadian politicians have tried to reduce this dependency, some by overt protectionist policies, others by expanding Canada's trade relationship with other countries, especially those in the Pacific Rim, thereby reducing Canada's dependence on the American behemoth. Either way you look at it, Canada's moral leadership on the human rights agenda is matched -- and limited, as will become apparent -- by its desire to curry the favor of potential trading partners.

Such is the context for the events of November 1997, and for the book under review. Canada is a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum -- a loose club not of countries but of "economies". This club's members meet periodically to discuss ways to promote trade and growth among their "economies". APEC is not supposed to be a political or diplomatic forum; it confines itself to economic matters only. Thus, the member "economies" vary from liberal democratic to authoritarian regimes. Canada is not a big economic player in APEC, but it had an opportunity in November 1997 to put its best foot forward by hosting an APEC summit on the campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver -- one of Canada's most picturesque cities in one of its most attractive provinces, and the one most proximate to the Pacific Rim.

The events that received all the media attention in November 1997 had little to do with the summit itself but with the tactics of police in restraining student

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demonstrators who protested the company Canada was keeping. President Suharto of Indonesia was in attendance, and students quite obviously knew that this man was not a beacon for human rights and inter-cultural understanding. No matter: student protesters were required to sign undertakings restraining them from protesting. Students were required to promise that they would not post signs along the motorcade route from their residence rooms in such a way that Suharto might see them. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) approved demonstration sites were created at a laughable distance from the APEC leaders, precisely, it seemed, to ensure that the leaders would not see the demonstrators. On the days of the summit itself, protesters who did make a fuss were put down in a manner that suggested police overkill. RCMP officer Hugh Stewart will live in infamy for having been filmed emptying a canister of pepper spray on a small group of protesters, including the cameraman who recorded it all.

Television images of RCMP conduct soon led to the emergence of evidence that the RCMP was acting not on its own initiative but rather under the direction of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). One student in particular was told three days before the summit that (in her words) "it was on the orders from the Prime Minister's Office that there should be no signs and no people along this stretch of the roadway. And the other things that the officers told me was that if I continued too put up signs that they would arrest me. And when I asked on what charge, one officer said to me 'we'll make something up'" (p. 145).

A mountain of evidence has since accumulated putting the PMO at the center of security arrangements for the APEC summit. Although the restraint of protests for the purposes of protecting the security of foreign personnel is entirely legitimate, the evidence suggested that Indonesia's Suharto required an assurance from the Prime Minister that he would not be "embarrassed" by the very sight of protesters. So, in order to avoid embarrassing the political thug, the Prime Minister apparently orchestrated the political sanitization of the UBC campus.

However, there is more. As events unfolded after the summit itself, public outrage led to an RCMP public complaints inquiry. Students restrained during the protests demanded legal representation at the hearings, but they were denied. Evidence suggests that Public Complaints Commission permanent staff influenced inquiry board members. Political people higher up the chain of authority may have influenced the latter. A CBC reporter who uncovered much embarrassing evidence of political influence throughout the APEC saga found himself pulled from the story. The list goes on.

These events are recounted in the fourteen essays collected in PEPPER IN OUR EYES: THE APEC AFFAIR. The essays range across the events discussed above. Some essays delve into the political economy of APEC. Several are written by persons directed involved in the sordid events. The reader is left with the impression that the editor was afraid to leave anyone out, any perspective unrepresented, and so the essays range almost too broadly across disciplines and discursive styles to comprise a coherent and consistently rigorous collection. Initially, I expected the book to be a disappointing series of superficial treatments of the subject. This was true of only a few essays. Rather, most of the articles were eye-opening, probing analyses of a host of civil liberties issues

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emanating from the events of November 1997.

The best essays examine questions of constitutionalism and accountability implicit in the controversy. For at the heart of the matter is the idea of the rule of law and the independence of police services from the executive branch of government. A police state, after all, is defined by executive political direction of the coercive arm of government. In his own substantive contribution to the book, editor Wesley Pue sees in the APEC scandal a constitutional wake-up call for a society that has forgotten the constitutional fundamentals as it has obsessed over constitutional ephemera. He writes,

"Taking the foundations for granted, generations of politicians, lawyers, philosophers, historians, and journalists have turned their attentions elsewhere. Colleges and universities -- even faculties of law -- no longer teach much about the constitutional fundamentals. We have become preoccupied with other things: arguments about the division of powers between the federal government and the provinces; endless wrangling between Ottawa and the Quebec sovereignists; the creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and controversial court rulings on gender discrimination, aboriginal rights, union picketing, gay and lesbian relationships, the rights of criminals and victims, and so on. Each if these is a weighty matter. They come into play, however, only at the second tier of importance and preoccupy us only because we have long had the luxury of taking the first tier -- the principle that police and other armed forces are to be used only to enforce the law, not to do the political bidding of government officials -- for granted"(p. 10).

This I believe is the book's signal value for students of law and politics. It exploits the occasion of a political scandal for sustained reflection on the fundamentals of constitutional government. While some essays fall short of this standard, many meet it and will have value for readers long after we forget the image of the hapless Staff Sergeant Stewart pepper-spraying a band of university students. Not all contributors to this volume agree with one another on the constitutional fundamentals. Perhaps Lord Denning, who wrote that the police officer "is not the servant of anyone, save of the law itself," penned the simplest description of the role of police in a constitutional order -- "No Minister of the Crown can tell him that he must, or must not, keep observations on this place or that; or that he must, or must not, prosecute this man or that one. Not can any police authority tell him so. The responsibility for law enforcement lies on him. He is answerable to the law and to the law alone" (p. 93). The picture becomes complicated, however, when this postulate of the rule of law is combined with the constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty, one aspect of which is that all exercises of political and legal authority must finally by subject to parliamentary accountability.

In one of the most interesting essays in the collection, Philip Stenning argues that a full picture of the matter in a parliamentary democracy requires a distinction between political control and political accountability. Although the rule of law prohibits the exercise of political control of the police, parliamentarism requires the exercise of political accountability. "According to this view," he writes that,

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"certain policing decisions ('law enforcement' decisions in 'particular cases') may be considered unsuitable for political control (directions by government) but still require full political accountability (the government is entitled to be kept full informed about them). Even within this view of police independence, however, there are two possible variations of police accountability: it may be required before the fact (the government is entitled to be informed before decisions are made or acted upon) or only after the fact (ex post facto accountability)" (pp. 97-8).

After a careful review of several instances of the clash of police and political interests, Stenning concludes that the state of the matter is muddled.

"One would think that forty years of experience involving several disparate situations would have provided a reasonable amount of clarity and consensus about the principles that ought to govern relations between the federal government and its police force .... [T]here appears to have been very little clarity or consensus among politicians, senior RCMP officers, jurists (including the Supreme Court of Canada), commissions of inquiry, academics, or other commentators either about exactly what 'police independence' comprises or about what its practical implications should be for RCMP-government relations" (p. 113).

PEPPER IN OUR EYES suffers from what may be called the trade book disease: prematurity. Many essays draw tentative conclusions about the events of 1997 because evidence (at the time of writing) was still to come in, boards of inquiry yet to report on findings, the historical record still to be set straight. Notwithstanding this, the book should be added to university library collections. Indeed it is accessible and of sufficient general interest to be made readily available to all intelligent general readers. Students of law and politics at all levels will learn from it. Also, for undergraduate teaching purposes, the APEC scandal provides a basket of examples of fundamental constitutional principles that, if the evidence revealed to date is determinative, have been observed as much in the breach as in the observance. The company he kept in 1997 may indeed soon judge Prime Minister Jean Chretien.


Copyright 2000 by the author