Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.Public unrest is usually treated as a problem the government must solve. Disorder appears, the public grows anxious, politicians step forward, and the state promises to restore calm. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Isn’t that what government is supposed to do?But what if unrest is not merely a problem for the government, but an opportunity? What if fear, anger, and division become the raw material from which governments manufacture more power?Citizens do not need to be mind readers to notice when something does not look right. A healthy society depends on trust, and trust depends on appearance as well as legality. When power repeatedly benefits from the crises it claims only to manage, people are entitled to ask whether they are watching misfortune or method.In poker, a player often has a tell. It is not proof of the cards in his hand. It is a pattern that gives the careful observer reason to suspect what is coming. Politics has tells too. One of the clearest today is the repeated use of fear as the sales pitch for expanded authority.The words change, but the structure does not. We are told the world is dangerous, divided, hateful, unsafe, misinformed, extremist, unstable, or under threat. Then comes the solution: more government, regulation, surveillance, emergency discretion, and control over speech, movement, property, and lawful citizens. The threat is always urgent. The cure is always centralized. The price is always freedom.Canada has already lived through one clear example. During the COVID-19 years, governments imposed sweeping restrictions in the name of public safety. Travel, worship, work, association, medical choice, and ordinary social life came under state direction. Those who objected were too often framed as irresponsible, dangerous, hateful, or morally defective.That tension culminated in the trucker protest, a broad public protest against government overreach, especially vaccine mandates and related restrictions. It was disruptive and inconvenient. Most protests are. But instead of meeting public anger with humility, transparency, and de-escalation, the federal government escalated. The Emergencies Act was invoked..That decision remains one of the most important tells in modern Canadian politics. A protest against excessive state power was answered with extraordinary state power. Bank accounts were frozen. Police authority expanded. The public was told ordinary law was not enough. Later, the courts found that the invocation exceeded lawful authority and breached Charter rights. Even if the courts had ruled differently, the appearance would still matter. A government facing peaceful but stubborn resistance reached for emergency powers. Citizens should not forget that.This is the first tell: protest against state overreach is used to justify more state overreach.The second tell is selective seriousness. Governments that claim to be ruled by safety often become strangely incurious when safety questions point in the wrong direction. During COVID, official voices insisted that public health required obedience. Yet when warning signals arose around the injections, especially through adverse-event reporting systems, the response was not the transparent pause and investigation one would expect from people genuinely ruled by caution. The machinery kept moving. Questions were discouraged. Mandates continued.A warning signal is not a conviction. It is a reason to stop, look, and investigate openly. If safety is truly the standard, then a dramatic safety signal should produce caution. When it produces dismissal, censorship, or pressure to continue, the public is right to notice.This is the second tell: safety is invoked to command obedience, but not to restrain power.The third tell is unequal enforcement. Nothing destroys public trust faster than a law that bends depending on who breaks it. A citizen who protests the government may be treated as a threat to public order. A person who violates immigration law may receive softness, accommodation, or public funding. A favoured movement may be excused as passionate, while a disfavoured movement is condemned as extremist before its claims are even heard.The point is not cruelty. Borders should be lawful. Protest should be peaceful. Police should act with restraint. But law must mean something. If the citizen who pays taxes, obeys rules, and asks questions is treated more harshly than the person who ignores entry laws, or the activist who uses intimidation, the public will draw conclusions. They may not have every file, but they can see the pattern..This is the third tell: government becomes strict with dissenters and gentle with disorder that serves the governing narrative.The fourth tell is the endless expansion of “safety” legislation. Online safety. Public safety. Community safety. Hate prevention. Misinformation control. Firearms safety. Child safety. Each phrase contains something decent that people naturally care about. That is why the language works.But the test of a law is not the virtue printed on the label. The test is the power it gives the state. Who defines harm, hate, misinformation, or risk? Who decides what justifies censorship, investigation, surveillance, confiscation, freezing of assets, or punishment? If the answer is always government, regulator, tribunal, or politically appointed body, then safety has become wrapping paper around control.This pattern is not uniquely Canadian. Britain under Keir Starmer is moving in the same direction through online safety, protest regulation, and speech policing. Australia under Anthony Albanese has followed a similar road through misinformation proposals, online regulation, and social media controls. New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern showed the same instinct during COVID. The European Union follows a more bureaucratic version through digital regulation and platform control.The method varies by country. The vocabulary does not. The public is told that danger is rising and only expanded institutional power can manage it.That brings us to Mark Carney’s repeated phrase about a “dangerous and divided world.” It is not a premise. It is a sales slogan. It prepares the listener emotionally before the product is presented. And the product is always a larger government: more planning, industrial policy, defence bureaucracy, international coordination, state direction, elite management, and less confidence in the ordinary citizen.A dangerous world may be real. A divided country may be real. But who made it more dangerous? Who made it more divided? Who benefits from the public believing that only the central authority can save them? When the same class that helped produce instability offers itself as the cure, caution is not cynicism. It is citizenship..This is the fifth tell: those who create or worsen disorder present themselves as the only safe custodians of order.The United States offers an important contrast. Donald Trump uses state power aggressively at the border, and that deserves scrutiny like any use of power. But borders are a core function of a sovereign country. A country that cannot decide who enters, who stays, and who must leave has ceased to take citizenship seriously. Enforcing immigration law is not the same as policing lawful dissent. The distinction is legitimate authority versus illegitimate expansion.Democratic Party policy in the United States more closely matches the Canadian, British, and Australian pattern. Border enforcement was weakened, public costs increased, sanctuary policies expanded, and social disorder grew. At the same time, came more pressure for speech control, platform moderation, gun restrictions, and administrative rule by unelected agencies. The result is a familiar inversion: soft borders, hard bureaucracy; leniency for lawbreaking at the edge of the state, severity toward justified dissent inside it.We do not need to prove what every politician privately intends. We can observe what they repeatedly do. They invoke danger, divide the public into responsible citizens and dangerous dissenters, expand administrative control, treat liberty as a problem to be managed, and promise safety while reducing freedom.A free society cannot wait for perfect proof before noticing the direction of travel. By the time the hidden file is opened, the law is passed. By the time an inquiry confirms what citizens suspected, the precedent has been set. By the time courts admit the government went too far, bank accounts have been frozen, reputations damaged, businesses harmed, and public fear deepened.That is why appearances matter. Public trust is the foundation of political legitimacy. When government acts in ways that appear manipulative, selective, self-serving, and hostile to ordinary freedom, citizens are not required to suspend judgement until every private motive is proven. They are allowed to say: “This does not look right.”And it does not..It does not look right when fear becomes the pathway to state power. It does not look right when safety justifies coercion but not restraint. It does not look right when protesters are treated as enemies while the preferred disorder is excused. It does not look right when speech, movement, property, medical choice, firearms, banking, and online life are pulled under the same expanding net of supervision. It does not look right when leaders who helped divide society warn that the world is divided.The tell is not one event. It is the repetition. Crisis after crisis, slogan after slogan, law after law, the answer is always the same: trust the state, surrender discretion, accept limits, obey for your own safety.A serious country needs order, but also limits on those who claim to provide it. It needs borders, but also due process. It needs police, but not political policing. It needs safety, but not safety as an excuse to smother freedom. It needs citizens alert enough to notice when the government no longer calms unrest, but feeds on it.The trap is not sprung all at once. It is laid piece by piece, each part justified by the emergency of the moment. A protest here. A virus there. A violent incident. A hateful post. A foreign threat. A border crisis. A child-safety panic. Each one becomes another reason to hand power upward.The duty of citizens is to notice the tell before the cards are turned over.Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.
