Thanks @chriswalkerCBC and @CBCKelowna for your interest in our complaint (led by @bccla) about RCMP spying. Eight years ago, two undercover officers infiltrated a workshop on "personal storytelling" hosted by @dogwoodbc and @leadnowca in the basement of a Kelowna United Church.

The notes from the officers are actually kind of funny. They were clearly hoping to find dangerous radicals plotting insurrection. Instead they found retired couples in their 60s practicing their speeches for a public hearing, and doing arts & crafts.

I gather they got bored, because they went out into the parking lot and starting writing down everyone's licence plate numbers. They noted one car had a "Don't Frack With My Water" bumper sticker. Evidence of sedition??

We only found out about it a year later because of an access-to-info request filed by a journalist about a separate story. But what came back was the tip of a very ugly iceberg. As @chriswalkerCBC pointed out on the air, RCMP have been infiltrating peaceful groups for decades.

I will remind you that the RCMP themselves have bombed oil & gas sites in B.C. (part of a "dirty tricks" campaign to justify more police resources, and try to frame a suspect). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/rcmp-bombed-oil-site-in-dirty-tricks-campaign-1.188599

In case it needs to be said, @dogwoodbc and our allies condemn violence. The RCMP's job is to solve crimes. Not to invent what Phillip K. Dick would call "pre-crime" or what Orwell called "thought crime". Infiltrating peaceful, law-abiding citizens is a waste of police resources.

It also takes officers away from solving actual crimes, like money-laundering (practically zero RCMP resources in B.C.) or the murder and disappearance of Indigenous women and girls.

More than that, these creepy tactics place a very real chill on participation in our democracy. Many, many people now think twice before signing a petition or RSVPing to an event on Facebook because they know Big Brother is watching. They tell that to me and to our volunteers.

It's not just infiltration -- we know the RCMP have Stingray devices to capture mobile device IDs. They have facial and voice recognition software. They have programs that crack your security settings on social media, and even AI that crawls your posts looking for emotions.

The Kelowna incident demonstrated a willingness to use police resources to surveil law-abiding citizens. We know they build profiles of people who criticize the government or voice support for Indigenous activists. And right now they keep that data indefinitely.

Again, you have a right to believe whatever you want in Canada. You have a right to express yourself, to criticize the government or a corporation. And you have a right to talk with and gather with your friends (outside of a public health emergency).

Unchecked, ever-growing police surveillance erodes those Charter rights. And it leads to truly horrifying abuses of police power, like the undercover cops in the UK who *fathered children* with activists they were sent to infiltrate, then abandoned them, ruining lives.