What does it mean to be a cabinet minister?  What is the point of all those years or servitude and humiliation in the name of the party?  You would presume it would be to do something, to wield power.

But you look at our cabinet you'd have to wonder if the point wasn't just more humiliation.  What else could explain the inability for ministers to actually do something about the things they tweet about.

It couldn't just be they don't want to do anything, could it?

Look at Bill Blair, the minister of public safety.  Ol' Bill you'll remember used to be the Toronto chief of police.  This is notable for a number of reasons.  For one, he spent a good part of his tenure arguing that his police officers stopping random people on the street — often Black people, ahem, randomly â€” and demanding they hand over some ID and generally get hassled, was good, right, and necessary.

He was chief when police removed their own IDs — odd! — and rounded up G20 protestors, beating the hell out of not a few of them, and illegally detaining thousands of others for hours on end.

So you'd maybe think our pal Bill would sit this current moment out.  Maybe shove his thumbs somewhere and refrain from tweeting.  When people all across this country, the United States, and through a large part of the world, are protesting against the brutality carried out by police against Black people and other people of colour that so often becomes murder.

You'd, of course, think wrong.

"Anti-Black racism is abhorrent and unlawful.  We cannot remain silent.  We must acknowledge the lived experience of our fellow Canadians and work together to end this injustice.  Now is the time to unite and to act," he tweeted.

This alternate-universe Blair might have taken a bit of time for reflection, and then decided he should resign.  But we don't live in an alternate universe.  And our Blair oversaw —and still oversees! — a system that so often brutalizes its own citizens.  Particularly when those citizens are not white.

And yet all he can do is tweet.  It must be humiliating to hold so much power, and still be so powerless.

Because for all of this goody-goody talk about being better and staring down racism, we refuse to do that at home.

While protests against police brutality in the U.S. are met with naked and unrestrained aggression of police throughout the country.  In cities big and small cops are using their monopoly on force to beat back people calling for them to stop beating and killing them.

Here in Montreal, protests were entirely peaceful until police decided to declare them illegal and launched tear gas to break them up.  It was then all hell broke loose, instigated by the very people purportedly there to stop it.  Police then had few qualms detaining journalists and pointing their (non-lethal) guns at them at point-blank range.

Policing has never been particularly kind to the the populations it focuses its efforts on, but there is a new level of menace from cops on the beat.  Crime is at or near all time lows, meanwhile cops are kitted out like Call of Duty cosplayers.  The militarization of police is here, and for all Blair's talk of working to end injustice, he's made no sign he'd like to lessen the security forces ability to bash heads.

There's an infection of a "us against them" mentality in modern policing, where cops see themselves as an occupying force in enemy territory.  The problem being, of course, this enemy territory is where we all live.

You can see this best in the proliferation of "thin blue line" flag patches and bumper stickers.  The term itself finds its roots in the military, as the thin red line of British troops — they still wore red coats then — that held the line against a Russian cavalry charge in the Crimean War.  In the early 1900s, it made its way into poetry about the U.S. Army — they wore blue coats — and eventually sometime midway through the century became associated with police. The documentary "The Thin Blue Line," about how cops and prosecutors put an innocent man on death row in a police murder case, really shot the phrase into public consciousness when it was released in the late 1980s.

Lately, it's found its way into mainstream police culture, with its own flag to signify the wearer as one apart from the rest of society.

It's actually quite revolting to see a thin blue line patch in person.  The Maple Leaf in black and grey with a blue line through it*.  It's not just front line cops who buy into this either.  I'll never forget clearing customs at Montreal Trudeau Airport after coming back from a trip out of the country.  As you leave the terminal, there's a CBSA officer — a quasi-police force under Blair's purview — at the end of the hallway that checks your slip and either lets you past, or sends you to have your bags checked.

Well, it was this guy, that day, who had a thin blue line patch on his vest where a regular flag should be.  It was an outrageous display, but at the same time grimly hilarious.  Like, buddy, you're not even the guy checking to see if people brought an extra bottle of rum back from vacation, you're the guy reading the paper and sending them off to another room for someone to do that, in the safest place imaginable.  You're nobody's idea of a frontline hero.

But that's how far this idea has seeped into police culture.  This is why cities and towns, no matter how small, have all bought or been given their own armoured vehicles, perfect for subduing citizens with extreme prejudice.  RCMP officers have no problems behaving like a recon platoon when arresting Indigenous people protesting pipeline development.

And when they're not pointing loaded rifles at unarmed protestors, police are assaulting and falsely arresting 61-year-old Indigenous women using walkers. Or arresting grandfathers and their grandchildren. Or leaving a man to die of hypothermia. Or racially profiling a student at his own graduation. Or for decades taking Indigenous people on "starlight tours," where they'd drop people outside of the city at night in the middle of winter and leave them there, many of them to die.

So maybe in the end the humiliation isn't Bill Blair's inability to do anything.  Maybe the humiliating thing is to be one of the citizens of this country fed lines from the likes of Blair.

The humiliation of being patted on the head and told again and again everything will be made better, even when it only gets made worse.

The humiliation is to have built up around ourselves an imaginary world where everything we do and say is right and just, but in the end, it is no such thing.  The humiliation is for all our preening, we aren't living in a country that is fundamentally better than the United States.  Our so-called betters just keep telling us it is.

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* Stylistically, the American version of the thin blue line at least lines up with one of the stripes of their flag.

Photo Credit: CBC News