Two Freedoms. Hugh Segal

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      The next morning, chatting with Donna over breakfast, I wondered about how many countries in the world there are where one could be stopped by a police car late at night, on an isolated highway, and be unafraid of a very tall officer, fully armed, approaching one’s vehicle. You might worry about a speeding fine, about the results of a breathalyzer because of when you had your last tipple, but you would not worry about being mugged, raped, robbed, or murdered. While the RCMP would be the first to accept evidence that they are by no means perfect, the core integrity, discipline, and public purpose of the force, indeed of all other Canadian police forces, are not in question. Freedom from fear requires a context where the police are, by and large, trustworthy and respected. A “peace officer” cannot and must not be an agent of fear.

      Belief in the legitimacy and honourable purpose of the state, in its democracy-based right to govern a society of many diverse individuals, is tethered to trust in the way the state seeks to operate, however imperfectly. What a police officer may have done, what a border security officer sought to do may not have been perfect; what they failed to do may be a problem too — human beings make mistakes — but the motivation for, the intent of their actions cannot be in dispute. When they are in dispute, or are found to be in bad faith or outside the framework of freedom and order by which a democratic society abides, disciplinary or criminal pursuit by authorities must be followed. Failure to do so creates those dark spaces where the public purpose of an officer of the law or peace officer becomes grey. And when that problem permeates society, the sense that there exists a “state within a state,” or a separate, self-directed, and self-reverential security establishment disconnected from the balance of public values and broad standards can emerge and weaken the public’s sense of freedom from fear. There is no greater threat to that freedom than impunity of those in authority. Where police brutality and other criminal actions by agents of the state go unpunished, where there is state protection that affords impunity for some, freedom from fear is most likely to erode.

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      Freedom from fear is intimately connected with freedom of expression. Public discourse can, at times, become strained, as different elements within a society, such as its political, business, and labour leaders, and those representing its various religious and minority groups, seek do defend their interests. However, this kind of debate does not weaken freedom from fear. The intensity of that debate, the openness of the disagreements, the variety of forums that hold them, their amplification by the media, may in fact strengthen freedom from fear. The intensity of the debate is a reflection of an absence of fear. The absence of fear enriches the debate, a climate that sustains freedom itself.

      When, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s success in securing its independence from Russia, the Ukrainian government sought to strengthen the democratic capacity of the country, outside groups (for example, the Building Democracy Project in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, which was aided by CIDA — the Canadian International Development Agency — in co-operation with the Open Society Foundation) undertook efforts with Ukrainian authorities in a host of ways to build that capacity. Work took place with political-science and history teachers on the fundamental tenets of open democracy; with political parties on the basics of organization, planning, policy, and nominative campaigning in an open democracy; and with the police so that they could understand that open debate during an election campaign was not justification to arrest opponents of the government. And while repressive, anti-democratic traditions, based greatly on the use of fear and all its tactical offshoots, could not, after sixty years, be eradicated in one election, the fact that the police and the army stood by and allowed the thousands of young people and others who hit the streets in 2004, as part of the Orange Revolution, to demonstrate and stand their ground (against a stolen election) indicated what progress against fear can look like. The subsequent jailing of a prominent player in the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, speaks just as eloquently of how the forces of fear and repression are never far from the main square and stand always waiting to deploy. Old habits amongst authoritarians do not die easily — not in Russia, not in China, and not in Syria, Iran, or North Korea. So “freedom from fear” is never something that is forever free. A forceful, continuing definition of that freedom — and an active, engaged, and uncompromising defence of it — matters greatly.

      The economic collapse in the 1930s that inexorably led to aggression, extremism, racism, and, ultimately, a catastrophic war in which millions perished, both civilian and military, still informs our duties and responsibilities today. Fear not only comes from the plans of a terrorist cell, the excesses of a police state, or violence within one’s own community. Fear also wins when a sense of economic chaos or embedded system failure produces a strong collapse in the democratic model’s stability and its ability to sustain a sense of hope. Because, when that collapse is threatened, the forces of darkness, dictatorship, and authoritarianism are always close at hand. Some may be on the far right, others on the left; inevitably they view democratic debate, such as that found in Canada’s Parliament, in the U.S. Congress, or in Westminster, as divisive and economically unproductive. And if the economic circumstances for middle-income and low-income citizens deteriorate, showing little hope of improvement, while the context for the very wealthy is unchanged, the fear of economic loss becomes deeply problematic.

      Typical media stories (they are just doing their job) highlight such things as youth unemployment, the compression of the middle class, the instability of the financial system, and the widespread public distrust of government and its motivations and integrity. Such stories, which many see as cynical, breed a range of responses and policy options in most countries. Political dissent and a clamouring for a change of government are one set of understandable and not always unconstructive options. The fact that these are options shows that people have some measure of choice over the context in which they live their lives.

      But there is a tipping point, when financial uncertainty, government controversy, and external economic pressures combine to produce new sources of fear, ones that can dilute the freedom from fear that is so essential to any architecture of civility, opportunity, peace, and progress. For example, in challenging economic times, when financial institutions are on shakier ground than usual and the demand for and price of commodities is depressed, foreign governments (like China) seeking to increase their international resource base can contribute unwittingly to a sense of fear in target countries. This heightened sense of economic vulnerability — not acute or intense — steadily builds and contributes to public angst about exposure to forces beyond anyone’s control. When the acquiring state enterprises are owned by countries where human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and due process are, at best, emergent, or at worst, a cruel charade, this sense of vulnerability is intensified. Russian and Chinese companies often fall on this list.

      Freedom from fear requires freedom from dominance by foreign repressive regimes and their economic and political interests, which rarely differ from each other in one-party state, government-owned enterprises. Democracies and open economies that embrace free trade, democratic government, and the largely unlimited movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas find addressing these kinds of foreign investment by state enterprises challenging. But the extreme reactions these kinds of investments provoke, dismissing them as just another kind of business transaction, or declaring them to be always impermissible, are too simplistic. Engagement with non-democratic economic players is not wrong; complete submission to their unique cultural and political prejudices when they are opposed to your own — all in the name of business — is never right. For freedom from fear to flourish in a nation, there must be a balance between economic and trade priorities and social and political considerations in its public policy. Processes that are open and rational, in which these sorts of deals are assessed against a realistic analysis of the broad public interest, are vital to managing these pressures.

      Back in 1990, Aung Sang Suu Kyi delivered what is widely known as her “Freedom from Fear” speech. She was eloquent about how corruption and fear interconnect.

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