Article published in Liberty, November 1997, pp. 35-36
Busted in the House of the People
by
Pierre Lemieux
At least in this part of the world, there are still circumstances where one can show Leviathan who is theoretically the master and who is the servant. Granted, such opportunities are getting rare, but I just had one on August 28.
I had been invited by a Parliamentary Committee of the Québec National Assembly (the equivalent of a State House of Representatives) to come to Québec City and defend my brief against the government's temptation to impose a citizen ID card. Since, more than ten years ago, a disturbed soldier went on a killing rampage with army weapons in the National Assembly, you have to go through a metal detector, have your briefcase X-rayed, and ... provide ID.
Now, wait a minute! Not only am I a sovereign individual, but I am coming here precisely to speak against ID papers. Since an official ID card does not yet exist, they expect you to provide a driver's license or a medicare card, even if the law explicitly forbids requiring these as ID except for their specific purposes. So, I produce my American Express card. A short discussion follows, where I explain that I never provide government ID.
I have apparently won the discussion, when the young receptionist asks me to state my birth date which he has to enter into his computer. (The Canadian police database works with names and birth dates.) When I once again refuse, the situation suddenly becomes more tense.
A big, uniformed cop comes from behind ("his hands upon his leather belt like it was the weel of some big ocean liner," as in Leonard Cohen's song).
"I am a police officer and I demand that you identify yourself."
I refuse. He orders me to pick up my things and come with him. With impatient and threatening gestures (but without touching me, although I feel it comes close), he pushes me before him along a corridor and into a vaguely Kafkaesque office. I have been busted in the House of the People.
Half a dozen desks are evenly spread around the room, with a big plainclothes cop behind each. "I leave him with you," the cop says to his colleagues. In French, his formulation could also mean, and probably meant, "I leave this thing with you." I stand in the middle of the room, with a dozen eyes staring at me in a deadly silence. I finally say something like, "Well, Gentlemen, who's the boss, here?" Apparently nobody.
The only cop who does not have his tongue in his concealed holster finally talks.
"We are investigators from the Sûreté du Québec " (the provincial police), he says proudly. A kind of conversation starts with him. Yes, I do refuse to give my birth date since this is none of their business. And, no, I don't have a Medicare card. (I am probably the only Quebecer in this situation.) My driver's license? I will not show it. "Anyway," I add, "I am lucky enough to still have the old one, without a photograph, since the bureaucracy issues the new one when you renew your Medicare card." I kindly agree, though, to tell them my address and phone number in Montreal. The cop writes them down in a small notebook.
"Hurry up," I say, "for I am to appear before the Parliamentary Committee in ten minutes."
A cop you would mistake for a killer if you met him in a dark street says, "Wait for me." He comes back a few minutes later.
"Follow me."
We walk (this time, side by side) through new corridors, up to another office, obviously belonging to a superior officer. Nobody is there. I sit in a deep easy-chair in front of the empty desk. My cop stays on guard behind his own desk in the waiting-room, just across the open door.
"Am I under arrest?" I ask.
After a few seconds of hesitation, he says, "No."
"So, I could leave immediately."
"Yes."
But he does not seem to mean that I could just walk into the Committee's meeting. Since I have driven 170 miles in the previous two hours to come here and do my resistant's social duty, I decide to stay.
Broken bits of conversation are exchanged with my uncommunicative guardian.
"It's strange, isn't it, that I am asked to provide official ID when people who work here pretend to be my servants, not my masters."
The cop frowns.
"You mean that I am your servant?"
"Not exactly, Sir. The Members of the National Assembly are my servants. You, you are one notch lower, you are an employee of my servants."
"If I am your employee, you cannot prevent me from doing my job," he replies with a fleeting flash of genius in his eyes.
"No, but I can prevent you from doing what I did not hire you for."
His closed face darkens again, and he resorts to the last line of defense he used before in our conversation: "You have the right to your opinion, Sir."
Finally, the boss arrives. By now, the first cop has obviously become nervous. Taking me to witness, he explains to his boss: "The gentleman asked me if he was under arrest, and I answered No." Approving nod from the boss.
I repeat to the newcomer that I will not provide any more information than what I already gave. "And hurry up, the Parliamentary Committee must be waiting for me." The malaise -- their malaise -- is now tangible. So, noblesse oblige, I decide to be nice with my servants.
"But I can show you the invitation letter from the Committee."
"May we see it?" the boss asks, in a conciliatory tone.
I pull it from my attaché-case.
"May we make a Xerox copy?"
"Sure!"
The boss rapidly returns, gives me the letter back, and orders his underling to walk me to the control booth and get me a laissez-passer. There, the young receptionist stares blankly to his computer screen, where the field "birth date" is still empty.
"I leave this as is?" he asks the cop.
"Yes."
During the presentation of my brief, I mentioned this incident to the MNAs. I even told them my birth date, to show that I had nothing to hide, but only a principle of liberty and personal dignity to defend. Somewhat unexpectedly, an Opposition member of the Committee lauded my brief quite profusely. And he added the ultimate flattery: "You actually don't look 50." Perhaps fighting the tyrant is the Fountain of Youth.
A representative of the ruling (government) party was not so laudatory -- although he sensed danger and remained relatively soft-spoken. He pompously and naïvely told me, "You are at home here." He looked as if he had been hit by a philosophical truck when I quipped back: "When I come home, nobody asks me for ID papers."
The last cop who had had me in his hands -- or in his way -- attended all my presentation, and left the room when I did.
One might say that this is all pretty innocuous. After all, they would have accepted my American Express and taken my birth date on my word -- if only I had looked more submissive. I was not tortured in the castle dungeon. There were probably some attempts at intimidation, but they quickly stopped when it became clear that I would call their bluff. Except for the first bully who considered me as a simple subject under arrest, the cops were correct and polite. I forgot to ask for the Prime Minister's social insurance number, but I finally entered the holy temple without providing any official ID nor my birth date.
But wait ... Wait till an ID card (compulsory or "optional") has been legislated. Or just wait until unofficial-official ID papers have attained here the status they have in other countries (including in the U.S.). The National Assembly's praetorian guard will then bark, "Your papers!", and anyone refusing to comply will be, at best, persona non grata. Official ID papers will bring many other extensions to our administrative tyranny.
Auberon Herbert, a former British Member of Parliament who became a staunch defender of liberty, wrote a remarkable 1894 article entitled "The Ethics of Dynamite."[1] He argued that the anarchist terrorists of his time were not really opposed to government, they were "government in its most intensified and concentrated form." The terrorists' dynamite, he wrote, is "the perfection, the ne plus ultra, of government." Speaking of the "war between those who govern openly by majorities and those who govern secretly by dynamite," he was "content to undertake the defense neither of the one nor of the other."
Herbert's hope was that terrorist violence would provoke a reaction against the use of force in human affairs, including state coercion itself. But, he warned, "if we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings -- as in one country they propose to do -- in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules ... I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time ... force users will be force begetters."
What is surprising is how much time it took for Herbert's prophecy to come of age. When their realization becomes obvious, we will regret not to have, while it was still time, peacefully resisted state harassment and firmly asserted our individual liberty and dignity.
1. Reproduced in Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, Edited by Eric Mack (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978), pp. 191-226..
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