SUSPECTS IN THE CITY

Abstract

This essay explores the circulation of fear and suspicion in Toronto and Montreal during perceived national security crises, which in recent years have been heavily influenced by post-9/11 US events, discourses and legal acts. It discusses how non-status residents and ‘Canadian-born brown’ residents have both become the focus of suspicion and intensified their own suspicion of fellow residents and police/state officials. In order to draw out the spectral life and real-world impact of current suspect figures, the essay examines the expression of mutual fear – in the context of a post-crisis ‘affective recircuitry’ – and briefly analyses the work of the Montreal-based People's Commission on Immigration and Security.

Keywords:

• urban space
• suspect communities
• racialization
• affective recircuitry

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kumi Silva and the two anonymous readers of this essay for their smart and provocative feedback.

Notes

1. As of June 2007, the number of accused had grown to 18, five were out on bail, one had been acquitted, and 12 continued to wait for their trial to begin. Their detention conditions, involving prolonged isolation, have been vociferously opposed by lawyers and family members. Their supporters maintain a website: http://torontopaintball18.blogspot.com (accessed January 7, 2009). Gosine (2007) discusses the Toronto 17 in the context of narratives and anxieties about diasporic youth in Toronto.

2. Ismaili Muslims who had been expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972, for instance, were apparently welcomed by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau after a personal phone call from the Aga Khan. Trudeau frequently used Ismailis as examples of immigrant success stories when multiculturalism policy was in its infancy. Today, Ismaili Canadian commentators' critiques of Islam (e.g. Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam) feature prominently in public discussions of minority religious accommodation in Canada.

3. Debates about how much Canada should succumb to US pressure in security and other areas are enthusiastically repeated in the media, in Parliament and in academic circles. See McQuaig (2007) for an anti-US Empire perspective.

4. Although my comments about urban space refer to the Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal, some might apply to cities in the US, UK and other countries largely populated by generations of immigrants.

5. In 2003, then Toronto Chief of Police Julian Fantino took a widely publicized 2003 visit to Jamaica to confer with Jamaican police, which reinforced a common popular discourse concerning the ‘cultural roots’ of crime.

6. Hameed and Vukov's (2007) essay on the ‘virtualized racism’ of immigration policy draws out the continuities between nineteenth century Continuous Journey legislation and the recent Safe Third Country agreement.

7. One example is that of Fateh Kamel, a Canadian citizen and member of the Groupe Islamique Armée, whose conviction led to a debate in Parliament about whether the federal government should grant itself the right to revoke citizenship for people born outside Canada.

8. The operation was outlived by its opposing group of activists, Project Threadbare, who now follow other related profiling and detention/deportation cases.

9. Not unlike in the US, where in 2006 then Republican Senator Conrad Burns made his infamous comments about the battle between the US and faceless terrorist enemies who ‘drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night’.

10. The report is available at www.peoplescommission.ath.cx.

11. Security certificates are pre-deportation orders that justify the detention of suspects without appeal and trials, based on evidence that remains inaccessible to suspects and their lawyers. After a persistent and well-organized oppositional campaign, led by detainee Adil Charkaoui and his advocates, the Supreme Court ruled the certificates unconstitutional, and they are in the process of being dismantled.