Christopher Dummitt: There’s nothing funny about ambushing RCMP veterans

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The details so far are sparse, but it seems that the officers targeted were those who dared to speak out against criticisms of the institution and claims about its intrinsically racist past. Perhaps they were like former RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, who in 2015, in the lead-up to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry, pointed out the inconvenient fact that, according to the available numbers at the time, roughly 70 per cent of the known offenders in solved cases were themselves Indigenous — a figure the inquiry would later dispute as not factually based, but one Paulson maintained reflected the data the RCMP had. This was not the kind of thing you were supposed to say back in 2015, and even less so today.

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The creators of this show can’t let this kind of thing stand. They are playing a game of ideological whack-a-mole, smacking down people who dare to speak inconvenient facts or espouse unpopular views.

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It’s ironic, because back in the 1990s, police forces and the Canadian government decided largely not to report crimes based on race. In the midst of controversies around things like Jamaican youth gangs, officials didn’t want the actions of a few bad individuals, splashed across newspaper headlines, to demean whole social groups.

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The same went, then and now, for admonitions not to use racial stereotypes. This is a liberal response to a clear social problem in a multicultural society: you don’t want racist group-think to categorize whole groups of people based on a stereotype, or to use the actions of one person to stand in for the whole.

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This liberal logic, though, doesn’t fit the priorities of those who want to bring race back into focus via talk of decolonization, reconciliation, race-based equity hiring and anti-racist training that puts race to the fore. In this context, we aren’t supposed to be race-neutral or colour-blind; we are meant to prioritize racial thinking, but only in the right way.

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The idea that this could be done without falling prey to old racist ways was always naïve at best. It’s premised on the notion that we could cordon off racial thinking just to help those we see as disadvantaged. It’s like asking for a superpower and promising you’ll only use it in one specific situation.

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Not surprisingly, once the power is unleashed — once you let some people prioritize racial thinking — the privileged few start to think they can use it in other ways too. We’re all human, after all. We all have natural in-group and out-group biases. If you tell people they can think in simplistic racial categories in one situation, they were always going to apply it in others.

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And that’s the dark heart of this not-very-funny comedy show. Other elements are worth pondering too — how on earth did this get past funders? What will it do to public trust in the CBC?

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But most important, I’d suggest, is the darker truth this reveals: the return of an illiberal blood libel to modern politics. If we’re not supposed to generalize from the individual to the group and back again, how come it was fine to do exactly that to these RCMP veterans?

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When activists — and too often our governments — call for decolonization and the need to radically rethink Canada, is this what they mean?

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National Post

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