Kayfabe for the Security State: How Canada Launders Protest Surveillance

Civilian surveillance becomes intelligence, intelligence becomes spectacle, and spectacle becomes permission to restrict protest.

Bernie Farber and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network present themselves as institutional enemies of Canada’s far right. Caryma Sa’d built a public identity by documenting figures such as Chris Sky and the Freedom Convoy. Ezra Levant and Rebel News attack Liberal institutions, anti-hate organizations and protest restrictions from the right.

Their public positions are antagonistic. Their political effect repeatedly converges.

Each side helps construct a spectacle in which protest becomes a security object. Civilian observers generate footage, identities and narratives. Anti-hate organizations translate open-source material into threat assessments. Partisan media amplifies the confrontation. Ministers and police respond to the resulting public pressure. Restrictions arrive as the practical answer to a crisis the ecosystem has already defined.

This is kayfabe for the security state. The term comes from professional wrestling, where performers sustain public antagonisms inside a production that benefits the whole promotion. It does not require every participant to meet secretly or follow one script. The structure works because their rivalry produces the same commodity: a permanent stream of threatening images that expands the political market for surveillance and enforcement.

The far right is real. Its racism, antisemitism, conspiracism and appetite for intimidation require no invention. The institutional operation begins when documenting those forces becomes a pipeline for state power rather than collective defence, labour organization or democratic accountability.

From cannabis law to the protest circuit

Sa’d first developed a public profile through criminal, housing and cannabis law. She became executive director of NORML Canada in 2020 and criticized the structure of legalization, including Ontario’s retail lottery and the exclusion of smaller operators. Her work emerged from the grey zone created when legalization preserved extensive police and regulatory power over people already operating in the cannabis economy.

Her public role changed during the pandemic. Sa’d began filming anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine demonstrations, describing herself as a journalist, satirist and “protest watcher.” The camera became the centre of the work. Political movements, counter-protesters, police and confrontations became a continuous online production.

In July 2021, Sa’d planned a public interview with anti-lockdown celebrity Chris Sky in Toronto’s Chinatown. Community organizations urged her to cancel, warning that the event would bring danger and harassment into the neighbourhood. She refused. Counter-protesters arrived, scuffles followed and police intervened before the event could proceed.

The spectacle elevated every participant. Sky received another platform. Sa’d became the independent figure willing to confront him. Anti-fascist organizers entered the scene as observers and opponents. Police became the indispensable manager of a conflict assembled around a media event.

The incident established the form that would dominate the next phase: a far-right personality generates provocation, civilian media captures the confrontation, anti-hate networks interpret it and police manage the consequences. Every camp can claim opposition to the others while the protest-surveillance apparatus grows.

The convoy normalized civilian intelligence

Sa’d spent weeks documenting the 2022 Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. She filmed participants, published encounters and later live-tweeted bail hearings involving convoy leaders. Her access and persistence were presented as independent citizen journalism.

The convoy contained reactionary politics, harassment and genuine threats. It also contained workers and small proprietors mobilized through confused, contradictory grievances against pandemic mandates and the federal government. Treating the entire event as one extremist bloc erased those differences and made security classification replace political analysis.

Civilian documentation became a way to perform surveillance without describing it as surveillance. The state did not need to assign an officer to every livestream or social-media channel. Activists, researchers and independent media produced an immense open-source archive, attached names and ideological labels, then circulated the material through journalists, police and government.

CAHN occupied a privileged position in this economy. It monitored far-right networks and supplied information to media, researchers, policymakers and law enforcement. Executive director Evan Balgord testified to Parliament about ideologically motivated violent extremism and submitted an affidavit about Jeremy MacKenzie and Diagolon to the Public Order Emergency Commission.

The organization was not merely commenting from outside the security process. Its research entered the official and quasi-official record through the authority granted to civil society expertise.

Diagolon exposed the intelligence loop

Diagolon grew around Jeremy MacKenzie’s livestream community, reactionary memes, antisemitism, anti-government rhetoric and fantasies of social collapse. Its imagery and political culture gave journalists and officials ample reason to investigate it. The question was whether the available evidence supported the stronger claims attached to it.

Internal RCMP material released through access-to-information requests revealed a serious verification problem. One assessment said CAHN was cited as the “main authority” on Diagolon across mainstream coverage and that, because information traced back to one source, triangulation and factual verification were nearly impossible.

The same released material included an RCMP assessment that Diagolon, as a distinct entity, did not pose a criminal or national-security threat at that time. Analysts described an ideological online community whose cohesion, purpose and organizational character were difficult to establish.

That did not make MacKenzie or his audience harmless. It established that the public threat narrative had outrun the intelligence agency’s own ability to verify the organization being described.

The pipeline was circular. CAHN interpreted far-right content. Media treated CAHN as an authority. Government and police consumed the media environment and open-source reporting. The resulting official attention confirmed the original portrayal. Repetition created the appearance of corroboration even when the information returned to the same source.

This is how civil-society intelligence becomes politically powerful. The organization producing the description is outside government, but its labels travel through institutions capable of surveillance, arrest and emergency law. Responsibility fragments at every stage. The NGO did not invoke the law. The journalist did not order police action. The minister did not create the underlying footage. The combined system still produces state power.

The Emergencies Act converted narrative into power

On February 14, 2022, the Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time since Parliament adopted it in 1988. The regulations criminalized participation in prohibited assemblies, restricted travel and enabled financial institutions to freeze accounts without ordinary judicial process.

The federal decision rested on a much larger record than CAHN or Diagolon. Border blockades disrupted trade, downtown Ottawa remained occupied and police coordination had failed. No evidence establishes that CAHN’s reporting alone triggered the declaration.

The Diagolon episode still reveals how an inflated threat environment assists extraordinary power. A murky online network became evidence of extremist penetration. The gap between hateful speech, militant aesthetics, criminal conduct and a legally defined national emergency collapsed inside a single security narrative.

The Public Order Emergency Commission later accepted the government’s invocation. Judicial review reached the opposite result. In January 2024, the Federal Court ruled that the declaration was unreasonable and outside the Act. It also found unjustified violations of freedom of expression and protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal unanimously upheld that conclusion. The government had not satisfied the law’s strict threshold. Speculative and tentative threats could not justify emergency power, and economic disruption could not be transformed into the required threat of serious violence.

The ruling exposes the danger of the pipeline. Once protest has been organized publicly as a national-security spectacle, the executive can act first and leave courts to define the illegality years later. The emergency ends, the extraordinary measures establish a precedent and those subjected to them carry the immediate cost.

Farber’s departure closed one phase

The access-to-information reporting on Diagolon appeared on September 12 and 13, 2023. On September 14, Bernie Farber stepped down as chair of CAHN and nominated Sue Gardner as his replacement. CAHN did not announce the change until November 7, nearly two months later and one month after October 7 transformed the politics of protest across Canada.

The timing deserves notice without inventing a confession. CAHN said Farber’s departure had been planned and reflected his desire to spend less time on call. No released evidence establishes that the Diagolon reporting caused his decision.

The institutional result was continuity. Farber remained on the board as founding chair emeritus. CAHN retained its media and government role. The leadership transition changed the public face without dismantling the network that converted monitoring into institutional authority.

October 7 redirected the surveillance machinery

After Israel began its assault on Gaza, Canadian streets filled with Palestinian solidarity demonstrations. The target of protest surveillance shifted. The political language changed from anti-lockdown extremism to antisemitism, public safety and the protection of Jewish neighbourhoods. The underlying machinery remained familiar.

Sa’d filmed workers cheering a pro-Palestinian march outside a Toronto Moxies in late 2023. The employees were subsequently fired, according to reporting on the incident. A recording made in public travelled through social media into an employment consequence. The camera did not merely document a controversy; it became part of the mechanism that imposed discipline.

On January 6, 2024, Sa’d filmed Toronto police carrying coffee and doughnuts to pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Avenue Road overpass above Highway 401. The officers were delivering items purchased by supporters whom police had prevented from reaching the bridge. The short video detached the exchange from that context and ignited a national story about police favouring anti-Israel protesters.

The footage reached CBC and other major outlets. Politicians and pro-Israel organizations denounced the scene. Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw apologized for the “concern and confusion” caused by the officers’ action and ordered a review.

Days later, Demkiw announced that demonstrations and congregations would no longer be permitted on the bridge. Police warned that participants could be arrested. Three people were arrested after returning to the location.

The overpass shows how spectacle becomes restriction

The Avenue Road protests were represented as intimidation directed at a Jewish neighbourhood. Organizers said the bridge was selected because it was local, visible and part of a broader campaign using highway overpasses. Police and advocacy organizations treated community discomfort and repeated disruption as grounds for location-specific suppression.

B’nai Brith Canada sought an injunction extending 500 metres north and south of the bridge. The court dismissed the request as moot because the police ban was already accomplishing the requested purpose. The judge did not strike the police directive down as a Charter violation.

That correction makes the episode more revealing. No successful injunction was needed. Media pressure and police discretion had already removed the protest from a strategic public location. The legal challenge became unnecessary because enforcement produced the result first.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association warned that police could not give themselves unilateral power to prohibit lawful assembly without extreme circumstances. Yet the arrests and barriers were immediate, while any constitutional reckoning would arrive later, if it arrived at all.

Kayfabe protects every side

The antagonism among these actors is politically useful. Right-wing media attacks Farber and CAHN as Liberal operatives. Liberal and anti-hate institutions point to Rebel News and the far right as proof that stronger monitoring is necessary. Sa’d can appear adversarial to both camps while continuing to generate the footage around which each side organizes.

When anti-Zionist critics challenge Farber’s politics, right-wing attacks recode him primarily as a Liberal. The Zionist institutional network disappears from the argument. Criticism from the left is then forced into visual proximity with reactionary media that opposes Farber for different reasons.

Farber can occupy the liberal centre as the target of extremists from both directions. The right receives an establishment enemy. Liberal institutions receive another example of polarized hate. The anti-Zionist critique is submerged beneath a spectacle organized around personalities rather than power.

Sa’d performs a related function through ideological ambiguity. Her cannabis advocacy, tenant work, Palestinian background and conflicts with far-right figures provide left-coded credentials. Her protest coverage repeatedly produces identification, amplification and disciplinary consequences valuable to police, employers and pro-Israel institutions.

Intent is not the decisive category. A camera can feed an enforcement pipeline without its operator receiving instructions from the state. A civil-society organization can shape intelligence without being formally absorbed into police. A media feud can conceal functional alignment precisely because the participants genuinely dislike one another.

Civilian cover solves a constitutional problem

Direct state surveillance carries legal obligations, disclosure requirements and political risk. Civilian monitoring arrives under the language of journalism, research, anti-hate work and public documentation. It collects information in public, packages it ideologically and delivers it into institutions without the visible presence of a police file.

The arrangement creates deniability. Journalists say they only reported. NGOs say they only analyzed. Police say they considered open-source information among many inputs. Ministers say they responded to community concern. Employers say they protected their brands. No participant claims responsibility for the complete chain.

The person filmed experiences the chain as one structure. Their face circulates, their politics receive a security label, their employer is contacted, their assembly is restricted or their finances become available to emergency control.

This is why the issue cannot be reduced to whether civilian observers possess a legal right to film in public. The relevant question is what institutions do with the footage, who supplies the interpretation and which movements repeatedly become targets.

The far right becomes the permanent pretext

The far right is not fictional. Chris Sky, Diagolon and convoy networks provided real examples of racist rhetoric, threats, harassment and reactionary organization. Treating them as props does not mean denying their agency or politics.

They function as props when institutions use their presence to define the boundaries of legitimate protest for everyone else. The exceptional threat becomes the model through which assembly itself is governed. Techniques normalized against reactionaries move easily toward Indigenous land defenders, climate activists, workers and Palestine solidarity organizers.

The target is therefore larger than the original subject. The state learns to treat protest as an intelligence problem. Civil society supplies the categories. Media supplies the urgency. The minister supplies the language of enforcement. Police supply the restriction.

The pipeline must be broken

The convoy and the Avenue Road overpass were not identical events. One involved prolonged occupations and border blockades; the other involved recurring demonstrations at a visible urban bridge. The actors, scale and legal questions differed. The same institutional sequence remained visible across both.

Private footage created the spectacle. Civil-society authority classified the threat. Media repetition transformed interpretation into common sense. Political officials demanded action. Police or the executive imposed restrictions. Courts reviewed only fragments of the process after the power had already been exercised.

The Federal Court of Appeal’s January 2026 ruling confirmed that the government crossed the legal threshold during the convoy. It did not dismantle the system that manufactured political permission for the crossing. The same surveillance and amplification machinery remains available for the next protest declared dangerous.

Breaking the pipeline requires more than exposing one personality. Police and government use of privately produced intelligence must be disclosed. Threat assessments must identify their original sources instead of laundering repetition as corroboration. Civil-society organizations feeding information to law enforcement must reveal those relationships. Public-order restrictions must face immediate judicial review.

Movements must also build their own methods of documentation, verification and collective defence. Leaving the public record to professional protest watchers guarantees that footage will be selected and framed by actors whose business depends on permanent confrontation.

Kayfabe works by keeping attention fixed on the fight inside the ring. Farber against Levant. Sa’d against Sky. Anti-fascists against the convoy. Zionist organizations against Palestine solidarity activists. The institutional winner stands outside the performance: a security state that receives more footage, broader categories and greater permission to decide where protest may exist.

The far right is dangerous. The answer is not to build a surveillance architecture that will inevitably be turned against everyone resisting Canadian power. The spectacle changes targets. The apparatus remains.

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