TORONTO. April 25, 2012. “The thousands of dollars I spent to fly back here, to  take 10 days off work, to  rent a car, to fund other expenses are down the drain,” an angry Brad Love told the monthly meeting of the Alternative Forum here tonight. Mr. Love had just learned that his appeal against a brutal 18 month sentence for breach of probation and a further three year political gag order had been postponed. The appeal was to be heard Monday.

 

1.     “The system is sucking me dry,” the Alberta-based oil worker explained. “I was charged four years ago for breach of probation – for sending a package of critical commentary to four Jewish groups, who had given me their permission.” Mr. Love was then under parole conditions stemming from a 2003 conviction, under Canada’s notorious “hate law” (Sec. 319 of the Criminal Code)  for writing non-violent letters to some 20 MPs and other public officials. He had received an 18-month jail sentence and Ontario Judge Hogg had imposed conditions under which he was forbidden to write to “anybody” without their express permission. [Those conditions, incidentally, were imposed in Ontario, not in the Congo or Burma.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The average black crack dealer would get legal aid for free, spend 20 minutes in court and get maybe 60 days in prison,” Mr. Love charged. This marks at least a dozen trips back to Ontario for this simple breach of probation charge.

 

 

“I was abandoned by my pervious lawyer as soon as I was sentenced to prison, last July,” Mr. Love recounted.” After six weeks his new lawyer effected his release.

 

“I am still working at Fort McMurray. All I make now seems to go to my lawyer. I wrote these letters These were my opinions. Let the cards fall where they may. Growing up, I was told by my parents: ‘If you don’t like something, speak up. The politicians work for you,’” he recalled.

 

Well, “the ;politicians waste billions of dollars on foreign aid, aid to Haiti, aid to Mali – I don’t even know where Mali is, training Costa Rica’s police force. I  am 54 years old. I work 84 hours a week and the government takes half. I don’t pay taxes; they take them from me,” he charged.

 

Africa, he argued, “produces children faster than we can print foreign aid money. It seems every time I write about immigration, it’s eight White cops who arrest me, not Blacks,. I hate my own government, not Blacks.”

 

Canada’s business and political establishment “want cheap labour. Every immigrant they bring in means a wage cut. A Somali cab driver in Fort Mac said he came from Toronto to Fort Mac ‘because there are too many fucking immigrants in Toronto for me to make any money.’”

 

Mr. Love is an impassioned and highly entertaining speaker. “I hear to the developing world,” he said. “What ‘developing’? Africa has been there for 100,000 years. They should be sending us money.”

 

He predicts that the trend of bringing in cheap foreign labour – despite high unemployment in Canada – will continue in Fort McMurray. Wages will go down and the good times will be gone.”

Mr. Love seems to be a special target of Ontario’s police. “My lawyer told me: ‘You’re on the police radar. Any contact with the police, contact us.’” On Tuesday, on a noon visit to the liquor store in Mississauga’s Applewood Mall, Mt. Love saw he was being surveilled by a police cruiser. He was questioned and asked had he been drinking. [No.] His ID was carefully scrutinized and he was asked where he was staying.

 

“Everything in this country is a joke, just a fumblebutt system,” Mr. Love said. “the police want an incident, to provoke me to react so that they can seize the bail my parents help put up. “This was the day after cops arrested two black bank robbers who jumped a counter and shot two people and some other blacks who robbed people on the subway.” Despite this real crime, “they still have time to watch Brad Love, who is not even from this province.”

 

Despite efforts by Mr. Love and CAFÉ, the Canadian media seems studiously uninterested in Mr. Love’s battering and gagging by the courts. Discussing these costly and prolonged proceedings, Mr. Love noted that no lawyer or judge has ever asked: “Brad, how are you coping?”

 

Some years ago, he recalled, he wrote letters to the Minister of Immigration critical of Haitians. “Four cops showed up and told me: ‘We don’t like the tone of your letters.”

 

“With what they’ve spent persecuting me they could have built a large home for seniors and done something for this country,” he said.

 

Still, Brad Love is a happy warrior: “I am still smiling. I go to work every day. I drink my beer. I snub the government and look at this country as a joke. Sodomy is legal. Gay marriage is legal,” but free speech is illegal.”

 

“People know I’m right, but they are afraid. They say: ‘I don’t want to be you, Brad.’ People fear losing their house, their bank account, their job. If you’re a dissident, there’s no safety net for you. The government wants to see you broke and living in a ditch.”

 

“It’s hard to believe in my own country,” he added. The decade-long persecution has affected my friends and my family,” he added. “I am not a skinhead, I am not a neo-Nazi. I am not a racist. But I do not like what the government is doing with my money.” – Paul Fromm