by Greg Knill contributing editor

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Burnaby-Douglas MP Svend Robinson was justifiably outraged Monday over the latest comments made by Prime Minister Jean Chretien regarding police attempts to quell protesters at last year's APEC meeting in Vancouver.

Chretien, who joked about initial reports that demonstrators at UBC were pepper-sprayed last November, said Monday that they were lucky the police didn't use baseball bats.

"Rather than taking a baseball bat or something," he said in the House of Commons, "they're trying to use more civilized measures."

True enough. We do not gun down our protesters like the Suharto regime had done in Indonesian. We do not crush them with our tanks, or cart them off to prison where they are never heard from again.

Then again, that's not the standard we want to be measured by.

There are countless societies that think nothing of mercilessly beating down dissent.

Here, dissent is an integral part of our democracy. We even provide a place for it in our legislatures by means of an "official opposition."

Our right to assemble and express our beliefs, meanwhile, is not a privilege bestowed on us by a benevolent ruler - a privilege to be withdrawn on a whim.

It is guaranteed under our constitution.

But what seems evident from the ongoing inquiry into the events that transpired at the APEC conference, is that those rights were traded away by a government more concerned with international prestige and the promise of commerce than its own people.

What's more troubling still, however, is that our prime minister sees nothing troubling with the actions that were taken that day. Instead, they remain material for jokes.

What Chretien has yet to understand is nobody's laughing anymore.

Greg Knill is the editor of The Review's sister paper, the Burnaby News Leader.

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