Sean Bickerton

One of the best things about running for council was meeting so many extraordinary people along the way. A number have become friends, and one of these kindred spirits - I’ll call him Steve - invited me on a tour of the Justice Institute of BC recently.

The Justice Institute is an accredited, degree-granting institution offering classes to 32,000 first responders and public safety professionals annually. In addition to a state-of-the-art campus in New Westminster, they also offer courses in more than 160 communities across BC; graduate 150 well-trained police recruits and 250 paramedics every year; and offer Canada’s only Baccalaureate in Fire and Safety Studies.

The Peace Arch: "May These Gates Never Be Closed"

In the course of organizing our visit, Steve and I discovered that we had a lot in common, including the fact we had almost met fourty years earlier at a pivotal event in the formation of the environmental movement - Don’t Make A Wave. Don’t Make A Wave was a massive 1969 demonstration in Peace Arch Park protesting an upcoming nuclear test in Alaska. Based on the success of that event, the organizing committee went on to found Greenpeace a year later.

After discovering that we had both been there, Steve dug up an old Ubyssey newspaper article about the demonstration. In one of those curious twists of fate, the Associate Editor at the time was the man on whose mayoral campaign we had just met – Peter Ladner.

How is it, you might well ask, that two ex-hippies found ourselves on a tour of the Justice Institute of BC, responsible for the professional training and certification of the Vancouver Police force and other first responders?

The simple answer is that times have changed. Unlike the bad days of the 1970s, today’s Vancouver Police force is a well-educated, professional force well-supported and populated by the minority communities it once troubled.

In addition to great leaders like Chief Jim Chiu, a part of the success of that turnaround can be attributed to the Justice Institute of BC, which conducts state-of the-art training of first responders using the latest in hi-tech simulation technology and a physical campus designed to facilitate real-world drills and training.

They are also training police forces from more than a dozen countries, imparting Canadian values of democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Women and men are not segregated, for instance, regardless of home-country sensitivities.

Most important to me, this is where our first responders are trained – the extraordinary individuals that rush into burning buildings when everyone else is running out.

Tom and I were living in Manhattan on 9/11. Even though we lived uptown and out of any danger ourselves, those events nonetheless forever changed our relationship to first responders, especially after so many died so heroically trying to rescue those still trapped inside the burning towers.

The real tragedy is that many died needlessly, using outmoded radios too weak to receive the evacuation call before the North Tower collapsed.

Every small neighbourhood firehall in Manhattan lost firefighters that day – ours lost half their force. For weeks, people in our neighbourhood lined up around the block to speak to the firemen and drop off food, donations, clothing, anything at all for the families left behind. Our firehall on East 85th was covered, all three stories, with cards from schoolchildren who wrote to them, flowers piled up in huge stacks against the sides of the building. It was the same all over the city – Firehalls became shrines.

If you spend five minutes inside the JIBC training centre, you learn very quickly that what matters most in an emergency is the ability to successfully coordinate available resources, manpower and information in real time. This is what makes their state-of-the-art situation centre so valuable. They are constantly putting emergency personnel through real-life drills and gaming out emergency scenarios with a constantly changing mix of personnel from different departments and disciplines. 

We have an obligation to ensure that emergency responders have the necessary training and equipment they need to do their job without unnecessary risk to life and limb. And that includes radios that work inside cement stairwells and are interoperable between police and firefighters, so that personnel and resources can always be safely coordinated when necessary. We should lay out a five year plan now to get this done.

It was Voltaire who said that when the government is wrong, the most dangerous thing of all is to be right. Nonetheless, many patriotic Americans did everything they could  to counter the radical ideology of those  that captured the White House in 2000.

Today that reign is discredited, the tragic results all too plain to see. The wreckage of their assault on reason is global, and the carnage, not limited to Iraq or New Orleans, lies strewn all around us: the shattered nations, economies and lives, the countless dead and wounded and the rule of law itself – that which Churchill called England’s greatest gift to civilization – shredded in all but name.

For those of us who lived in the U.S. through this time, it was heartbreaking to see the majesty and promise of the American Constitution desecrated by those posing as patriots sworn to its defense. Particularly when it is the rule of law that Constitution represents which is our best hope of defeating el qaeda.

Back in 2002, the neocons were riding high and planning the destruction of Iraq. That October, they published a clarion call in Foreign Affairs Magazine proclaiming a new era of unchallenged American supremacy, the final realization of Manifest Destiny and the virtues of American exceptionalism.

The following was my response on October 3, 2002. It rings as true today as ever before:

A Response

Mssrs. Brooks and Wohlforth err, and they err egregiously in at least two fundamental ways. While their assessment of U.S. economic and military power in relation to the rest of the world is essentially sound, they fail to take into account the fact that America didn’t get into this position through divine intervention, i.e. Manifest Destiny, and neither did it do so on its own.

America did not even win the Cold War on its own. Far from it, it did so in concert with the full participation and cooperation of other NATO governments and the active cooperation, if grudging, of those country’s citizens. While the authors denigrate that importance today, now that the U.S. stands astride the globe, the industrialized world had a part in this success, helped pay the expensive price for it, and expects a voice in the world order they helped create and today help maintain. Ultimately, even though America has more guns and bullets, it does not exist in a vacuum and ultimately cannot stand successful on its own.

With extraordinary hubris, they also make the case that the new American position is unassailable, “unique” in history. In my experience, whenever pundits declare something permanent and unique in our history, some unexpected event occurs to upset that particular apple cart. History teaches us that, regardless of the specific unanticipated causes and effects, it repeats itself.

Despite the authors’ limited ability to perceive some unexpected diminution of American power, I assure you that just as the Egyptian, and Babylonian and Mongol and Mayan and Roman and British Empires rose and fell, usually from causes of their own making, so, unfortunately, will our own. It’s called history, and no scholar, no matter how brilliant, can cause the Ozymandian suspension of its inexorable progress. So let’s not be too self-congratulatory just yet, particularly when our own world ‘dominion’ has barely existed for less than twenty years. A more intelligent assessment might be that world leadership today is our own to lose, an entirely different proposition, especially given current political trends in the nation’s capitol.

But fundamentally, and characteristically, what the authors miss, in their rush to declare the new American world order, is this — the power of American ideas. In truth, American power in the world has always been the power of its revolutionary idea that individual freedom and liberty arise from the very nature of being human. People don’t buy Big Macs or Levi’s jeans — they buy a piece of the American dream. Western governments didn’t align themselves with America because they had a vast military-industrial complex. They aligned themselves with a nation with shared humanist values that they could trust to lead in an enlightened way, albeit one strong enough to ensure the common defense.

If Americans, and worse yet, American scholars forget this, and now believe that this is America’s hour to lead the world unrestrained, to cast off the shackles of the Lilliputian nations in Europe and those like Japan and Canada that worry stupidly about land mines, and pollution and an international court to restrain genocidal dictators and the UN and global warming, and all of those other annoying little “people problems,” then their entire understanding of the roots of American power, which lies bedded in the ideals of individual human rights, is misguided. American power rests squarely on the concepts embedded within the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, which in and of themselves have been as revolutionary a force on this earth as the concept of a single, unifying God.

The real question the authors should be asking is, what ideas are going to lead the world into the future? What is our compelling vision of a peaceful world for the next century that all people can understand and believe in as instinctively as the 20th century American dream? That’s an article I’ve yet to read, but eagerly await.

Today, on January 20, 2009, more than six years later, the entire world watched the inauguration of the author of that next chapter – Barack Obama.

As Churchill said, “This is not the end. Nor is it the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning …”

Help is on the way!

George Bush’s reign of terror is over. Today, Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States, and called on Americans to join him in confronting what he described as an economic crisis.