Surveillance beyond order maintenance

How surveillance becomes a tool for reifying social hierarchies in Canada

The phrase “Orwellian” is often used to describe far-off totalitarian states, or, something resembling the novel 1984 by George Orwell, a science fiction that tackles dystopian societies where one is constantly being watched. However, surveillance occurs in a myriad of forms, and Canada is partial to many surveillance practices that threaten civil liberties and egalitarian principles. Surveillance practices in this country disproportionately target marginalised groups, from racial profiling in public spaces to increased monitoring of political activists; in this way, surveillance is not merely an administrative act that fights crime and maintains order in the country, but an increasingly political one that enforces social hierarchies. The ways in which one government can infringe on the privacy of its people may even be viewed as dystopian.

Surveillance is a fact of life in the modern era. Across the globe, governments are increasingly utilising technologies from cameras to AI to monitor their citizens, which to some degree are necessary for governments to fight crime and promote order. But what happens if surveillance oversteps, or is used to strengthen power structures that are harmful to certain communities?

In Canada, there has been a long tradition of surveillance of communities of colour. The legacy of surveillance is deeply rooted in colonial history, in which Indigenous people were frequently monitored and restricted—from the displacement of Indigenous groups from their land and the later utilisation of the pass system that confined them to reserves, to the establishment of residential schools designed for the purposes of conditioning and indoctrinating Indigenous youth. Moreover, in the construction of a society that elevated the idea of “whiteness,” immigrants that came from non-white countries also faced increased surveillance. Take the Chinese Exclusion Act, spanning the late 19th century to early 20th century, in which people of Chinese descent were heavily restricted in their ability to enter Canada, sometimes refused or even deported. These examples illustrate how certain groups of people are policed more than others. 

Moving forward from this history, present-day Canada still has much to address. In more recent years, surveillance practices such as “carding” in Ontario, akin to the “stop and frisk” practice in the United States, involve police stopping individuals to collect their personal information without concrete grounds for suspicion. Practices like these have placed individuals of colour, especially Black and Indigenous people, under disproportionate scrutiny in public spaces. Carding is often the first contact point that leads to further police-inflicted violence.; Ffor instance, the Ontario Human Rights Commission reported that Black people in Toronto are 20 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white counterparts.

Furthermore, Canada’s 2015 Anti-Terrorism Act expanded the powers of intelligence agencies to monitor individuals deemed threats to national security by criminalising the advocacy or promotion of terrorist offences. While the stated aim was to counteract terrorism, many law critics have raised concerns as to what this may entail. Toby Mendel, Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, wrote that there is a potential for individuals to be targeted for speech that in no way represents an actual threat to security. Surveillance tools, though neutral in concept, can disproportionately affect those who challenge dominant power structures. Therefore, the increasing power given to the government through law and policy to enforce thought and behaviour under the guise of security must be challenged.

Ultimately, surveillance is not merely an administrative act, but a political one. As such, it is important to recognize that every nation has its own politics of surveillance, which articulate the nation’s values and psyche upon which it was founded. For Canada, it is the preservation of whiteness and the idea of purity that became core values of the country. Through surveillance of the marked “others” that do not belong in this national narrative, such as Indigenous and other racialized communities, these hierarchical structures are solidified. Canada is not the only country that uses surveillance to reach such goals and is part of a larger trend of nation-building in which states use surveillance as one of their many tools to control populations and retain dominance; for another country, seemingly intrinsic values could be adherence to a certain religion, ideology, or the superiority of one ethnicity over another.

However, for a nation like Canada—with a long history of racism but also a commitment to freedom and equality as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—this contradiction is striking. Going forward, the way that Canada as a nation rewrites laws and policies on surveillance will dictate the values of the nation at this present moment. The challenge will be the delicate balancing act between preserving civil liberties and preventing discriminatory practices, while still upholding order.