About Me

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How else have I been useful? Most activists in Canada have been on the radar a long time. I just dropped out of nowhere, I think. No credit card, no cellphone, was outside of Canada for several years. I'm also as critical as any grassroots, anti-oppression, left-wing activist, and yet, I've invariably worked for large organizations - Rogers, Ontario Hydro, Ministry of the Attorney General.

I also have overseas work experiences and a penchant for large-scale models for socio-environmental change - be it corporate or co-operative. In both the private and non-profit sectors, publications I co-ordinated went out to 26 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, for one org, and 27 countries worldwide, for another. I've always wanted to reach the widest audience possible.

I developed a marketing proposal for an airline that would have centralized and streamlined internal and external communications worldwide, affecting thousands of staff, 2 subsidiary companies, tens of thousands of travel agents, and millions of customers around the globe. When I got the distinct feeling that my apartment had video surveillance in September 2001, I tried to hide this proposal (scan to come). Three years later, I saw a similar flowchart for centralizing the U.S.'s 15 different intelligence agencies in Time Magazine.

The reality is, after 9/11 and the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, and the ensuing "War on Terrorism," suddenly several years later a 'homegrown terrorist' was uncovered as a seeming part of the plot. That is, a Muslim man who was born and raised in the United States was now a radical, murdering terrorist. I have my doubts.




It's also worth mentioning that several of my relatives are 3rd and 4th-generation Chinese Canadians, who are fairly vocal and critical of the Canadian status quo. In fact, four of my relatives co-founded the Chinese-Canadian National Council in the late 70s, which was initially formed to protest media racism propagated by a W5 episode, in which native-born Chinese-Canadians were being portrayed as immigrants taking over Canadian university classrooms. The strong reaction became the first, and possibly only, time that Chinese-Canadians mobilized in a united front across the country (beside demanding the right to vote in Canada in the 1800s - ask my relative, he's written a book about the history of Chinese in Canada).

So the surveillance isn't just focused on me, but also my family and their social circles. To collectively study established Chinese-Canadians (who are themselves a significant/influential ethnic group in Canada) was, I believe, interesting to the authorities. One of my relatives is in the Canadian Who's Who, hobnobs with diplomats, is friends with several prominent Chinese-Canadian public figures and politicians, whom I'll refrain from naming, and so on.