Protestors demonstrate against carding in Toronto on Sept. 1.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
If Yasir Naqvi, the Ontario Minister of Community Safety, took a position on lemonade, it would probably look like this:
"We believe that lemonade has a valid refreshment purpose and should continue to be part of the standard arsenal of cold beverages used to combat thirst. However, we have zero tolerance for the squeezing of lemons to extract their juice, and stand opposed to the mixing of lemon juice with sugar and water to produce a potable liquid. Thank you."
Classic political doublespeak, obviously. But also an illustration of the contentious logic that supports carding in Ontario and, by extension, the rest of the country.
In Toronto, carding involves police officers arbitrarily stopping people on the street and asking them for their names, addresses, the names of their acquaintances and other personal details. It is generally confined to neighbourhoods that have gang-related crime problems. Police use the information to build a database that they believe might be helpful in the investigation of future crimes.
Carding is not the same as stopping a citizen in the immediate aftermath of a crime and asking why they are nearby and if they saw anything suspicious. That is a perfectly legitimate police practice. It is also fair game for an officer to approach someone and ask for information, with the mutual understanding that the person can refuse.
With carding, compliance is expected. In Toronto, officers were expected to card citizens as a measure of performance; there are more than a million entries in the database created by carding stops. But the policy has been exposed as one that targeted racial minorities; there are black men in the city who have been stopped dozens of times each, while there is no corroborating rate of carding among white people.
It is also problematic because arbitrary police stops can escalate quickly and lead to conflicts and bogus arrests. Citizens who are not suspected of a crime have the absolute right to remain silent in the face of police who aren't investigating a crime; they can even be rude about it. But too often, innocent people who have insisted on their rights have found themselves face down on the ground being handcuffed, their head under a blue-trousered knee.
The province has been holding consultations on carding in the wake of a public outcry, one that also led the Toronto police service to put a moratorium on the controversial practice. Mr. Naqvi says he is hoping to "develop a new regulation to govern police interactions with members of the public," and says the government is guided by two key principles:
"We have zero tolerance for racism or marginalization, including any form of discrimination…; and we stand opposed to arbitrary, random stops that do not have a clear policing purpose, and which are done solely for the purpose of collecting personal information."
The only honest translation of that is, no carding. But Mr. Naqvi also says that "street checks done properly are a necessary and valuable tool for police in their efforts to help communities remain safe and secure." And his regulation will "address reasons for storing any information that may be collected as a result of a street check" – meaning he expects the data-gathering to continue.
It's hard at this point to tell whether Mr. Naqvi's goal is to say that he has ended carding while effectively allowing it to continue, or giving the appearance of allowing it to continue while effectively ending it.
Carding, a.k.a. "street checks" and "police stops," has always skirted being unconstitutional while at the same time being praised by its supporters, without solid evidence, as a useful crime-prevention tool. In Saskatoon, which has one of the highest per capita carding rates in Canada, the chief of police, Clive Weighill, recently defended the policy by saying it "helps people be accountable for what they're doing in the evening."
That's utterly outrageous, of course. Canadians not suspected of a crime don't have to account to police for what they are doing at any time of day. We don't live in a police state.
The police chief's comment is, however, a good illustration of the carding conundrum: How can we make people account for themselves to police in an arbitrary fashion, while remaining a free society? Mr. Naqvi's quest to ensure that Ontario lemonade contains no lemons is emblematic of carding's inherent contradictions.
Really, if having a database of every person's name, address and acquaintances is such a valuable crime-prevention tool, why not require all Canadians to register this information with police, complete with retina and fingerprint scans? That would at least have the merit of being non-discriminatory. It would also, of course, be far outside the bounds of constitutionality.
And yet governments and police forces continue to search for rationalizations to allow carding. It boggles the mind.