Racist Priorities and the Colonialist Mindset

The choices made by Ottawa’s councillors, to maintain and significantly increase the OPS budget year after year shows the public, their constituents, exactly where their values lie, and who’s lives they care about. Police have time and again shown themselves as protectors, not of the public who they are supposed to serve, but of the rich and powerful in this city (a group that is, hey!, predominately white!). The dismissive responses I have received from various city councillors and the Mayor of Ottawa about how they are handcuffed by THEIR OWN DECISIONS, and that there is nothing THEY, the ELECTED officials meant to govern our city, can do about the Ottawa budget is absurd. It also shows how negative a coercive fourteen the OPS is. Our Mayor reprimanded me in his email by saying that any cuts to the OPS budget would come out of police salaries. So he and the rest of our officials are very clearly stating that the financial well-being of a select few is more important than the black and brown lives of the citizens in our city. The future of Ottawa should be something that the rest of Canada aspires to. A place where our most victimized and abused are helped, rather than beaten and assaulted, by the services that their taxes pay for. It is a place where indigenous values are brought to the forefront and Canada’s colonialist and genocidal past is dealt with and fixed. Where I, even as a white man, don’t grip my steering wheel tighter when I see an OPS vehicle, where seeing a cop near my fellow citizens doesn’t make me raise my camera, hoping that some event of police brutality doesn’t occur.