Embarrassment of glitches: undercover RCMP officer planted at student paper can’t fool Ryerson students
Fresh off their coup of exposing explosive stores in Forest Hill and finding drugs in proximity to hippies, the G20 security forces have had a small setback: the Ryerson student paper, The Eyeopener, is reporting that an undercover RCMP officer was escorted from its downtown Toronto office yesterday.
An undercover RCMP officer was escorted out of the Eyeopener office today by Ryerson campus security after refusing to leave. Around 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon RCMP Officer Leslie Tull was attempting to use the student newspaper’s office to monitor about 10 quiet G20 protestors in Ryerson’s Student Campus Centre (SCC).
Dressed in plain clothes, Tull refused requests to leave while asking several people in the office if they knew how many exits were in the building and if the protestors could be kicked out. After repeatedly asking Tull to leave Eyeopener staff called security to remove Tull from the work space.
Of course, the RCMP was just being careful: everyone knows that plots for world domination begin by capturing the student-run university press. Hard to tell what’s more humiliating for the RCMP in this situation: that its officer had her cover blown so quickly or that she had to be escorted out by the same campus security who spend the school year ignoring pot-smoking hacky-sackers.
• Undercover RCMP officer spies on G20 protestors, refuses to leave Eyeopener office [The Eyeopener]
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Dressed in plain clothes, Tull refused requests to leave while asking several people in the office if they knew how many exits were in the building and if the protestors could be kicked out. After repeatedly asking Tull to leave Eyeopener staff called security to remove Tull from the work space.
Of course, the RCMP was just being careful: everyone knows that plots for world domination begin by capturing the student-run university press. Hard to tell what's more humiliating for the RCMP in this situation: that its officer had her cover blown so quickly or that she had to be escorted out by the same campus security who spend the school year ignoring pot-smoking hacky-sackers.
• Undercover RCMP officer spies on G20 protestors, refuses to leave Eyeopener office [The Eyeopener]){kind=link}
Constable Tull should be charged for discreditable conduct by the RCMP.
She was asked to leave and refused, resulting in security escorting her out. Since when does an RCMP officer refuse a lawful order to leave private property?
I have noticed that the Canadian Federation of Students does try to place its most radical operatives in positions of power and responsibility in most university and college organizations.
Having had the opportunity to work closely with a university newspaper for the last 2 years I can firmly say they were surprisingly like most real reporters: underpaid, over-confident and painfully conformist.
I then went back through their archives to find if the campus paper was ever anything except a admin mouthpiece or a vanity press. I had to dig back to late 60’s-early 70’s when it must have was been run by some Marxist cult.
Whatever their political faults, those youthful Marxists (Maoists? Trotskites?) ran a literate, exciting newspaper with links to the local community and other campus papers. If the CFS could send ‘radical operatives’ with the same sort of journalistic vigour to our local university I would be much obliged!
I’m writing this because the archived papers from the same time period contained screeds against RCMP infiltrators that I had assumed had sprung from youthful paranoia run wild. I’m now beginning to wonder if RCMP interference isn’t the price of doing actual journalism in Canada…