A Victoria Day Special (Part 3): Does Anyone Care?

Author’s Note: This piece serves as an active field study and further exploration for my upcoming book, “The Illiberal Turn.” It investigates a core thesis of the project: how modern liberal democracies are quietly pivoting away from democratic accountability and social protection, shifting instead toward institutional coercion, systemic apathy, and the abandonment of the ordinary citizen. When the state falls radically silent in the face of widespread digital victimization, it abdicates its primal social contract—a phenomenon explored deeply throughout the chapters of the forthcoming manuscript.

Introduction: The Radial Silence

This blog does not begin in a vacuum, but in the immediate, chilling aftermath of the last two pieces on cyberfraud. In those two parts—A Victoria Day Special (Part 1) and A Victoria Day Special (Part 2)—I described the reach of cyberfraud, how it uses the techniques of psychological detention and digital arrest to deprive victims of control over their decision-making facilities and act as arms of the fraudsters, and the failure or refusal of police and financial institutions to respond to what is a “growth industry” depriving the vulnerable—the elderly, the new immigrant—of their life’s savings. The two articles exposed the institutional failures and broadcast a clear Call for Action.

I sent both parts of “A Victoria Day Special” to every MP and Senator, every Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), the Mayor and Councillor of the City of Toronto where I live, as well as the national and provincial organizations representing municipalities, police boards, and chiefs of police. I sent them to the Principal of the University of Toronto college of which I am a senior fellow.

The response was a stark masterclass in what can only be described as a radial silence—a suffocating quiet that begins at the dark center of our governing institutions and radiates outward into a paralyzed, passive public.

• The Institutional Void: Out of the dozens of targeted system leaders, the silence from the halls of power was absolute. I received exactly two responses out of the hundreds of our elected representatives to whom the articles were sent. None from the organizations of municipalities, police boards, and police chiefs. The two solitary responses came from a Senator and a Toronto City Councillor. The college where I am a senior fellow advised me regretfully that its calendar for the year was full, so it could not host a forum to discuss the issue of cyberfraud, though it thanked me for raising a very important issue.
• The Digital Echo: Across Substack, Rumble, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, the articles resonated deeply with subscribers and the broader public. I received a flood of personal reactions, private agreements, and nods of approval confirming that this is a critical crisis.
• The Passive Bystander Dilemma: Yet, this digital warmth translated into very few public reactions, and only two individuals actively stepped forward to ask the vital question: What can we do?

So, this piece, one that I had not planned on writing, is in fact an anguished cry for my fellow citizens to act as citizens, for those who claim to be our elected voices to act as our elected voices, for the agencies who claim to “protect and serve” us or to educate us in values of good citizenship to do their job.

But that’s not what our governments are asking or directing law enforcement agencies to do. What are they actually prioritizing? Our federal government and Parliament are fast-tracking bills centered on antisemitism, the control of free speech, and the criminalization of dissent. In Ontario, the province where I live, expensive YouTube ads proudly proclaim how the province is making us safe by hiring more police officers and building more prisons. I am yet to see a single ad, public statement, or legislation that recognizes the millions that the most vulnerable are losing in cyberfraud, ruining people and families daily.

The state has fundamentally abandoned its primary social contract: the duty to protect its citizens from being preyed upon. And we are letting them get away with it by our silent complicity.

🏛️ The Four Pillars of Institutional Failure

The financial crime that I have described in the previous two articles reveals four pillars of institutional failure:

1. Disinterested Investigation (The Police)

• The Reality: Local police forces are paralyzed by inertia, bound to an archaic, localized case-by-case model that is fundamentally useless against decentralized, borderless cyber-syndicates operating across provincial and national boundaries, taking advantage of instant, real-time communication via the internet and the movement of money.
• The Gatekeeping: The systemic reliance on arbitrary financial thresholds means that if a fraud does not hit a specific monetary line, it is treated as “not worth investigating,” effectively decriminalizing widespread victimization.

2. Weak Regulation (The State Oversight)

• The Reality: A fragmented regulatory landscape exists where federal telecom authorities and provincial regulators consistently leave massive, permanent blind spots for scammers to exploit.
• The Vulnerability: Telecom networks allow spoofed numbers to pass through completely unchecked, while digital payment processors operate with minimal friction or accountability.

3. An Uncaring Industry (The Banks)

• The Reality: Multi-billion-dollar financial institutions consistently offload the entirety of financial and emotional liability onto traumatized citizens.
• The Hypocrisy: They actively choose to protect their quarterly bottom lines rather than investing heavily in proactive, real-time AI defenses that could easily flag or halt anomalous transaction patterns before a citizen’s life savings vanish.

4. The Radial Silence of the State (The Lawmakers)

• The Reality: There is a devastating psychological and societal cost when the state fundamentally abandons its duty to protect its citizens. When lawmakers refuse to acknowledge digital violence, they become complicit in the trauma of their own people.

📢 The Call to Action: Badgering the Machine

In Part 2 of this series, I provided a detailed and concrete “Call for Action” that we should advocate for. This was a direct call for concerned folks in the community to shake off passive agreement and act. If the state will not move out of a sense of duty, we must force it to move out of sheer exhaustion. Here is a further call to you, my fellow citizens, for action to persuade our lawmakers, public institutions, and media to move on this issue:

• Badger Your Representatives: Reach out to your federal, provincial, and municipal elected representatives via phone, email, or town halls. Call them, email them, talk to them—they need to be relentlessly badgered until cyber-defense becomes a vote-moving issue.
• Target the Executive: Write directly to the Minister of Public Safety. Demand structural overhauls of how cybercrime is triaged and tracked nationally.
• Demand Media Accountability: Demand that the mainstream media stop treating these stories as isolated, “buyer beware” human-interest pieces and start covering them as systemic infrastructure failures.

💥 Conclusion: When Good People Keep Silent

To break this radial silence, we must weaponize our history, our prose, and our cultural art. Let these final guideposts serve as the multimedia blueprint to shatter the quiet.

👤 Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First They Came”

In his 1946 poem, “First they came,” the German pastor Martin Niemöller cautioned humanity against the catastrophic delusion of “it doesn’t affect me.” The price of silence in the face of institutional rot is that eventually, the system turns its indifference and violence on those who remained indifferent when the group they didn’t belong to was being persecuted. The system isolates and picks off groups one at a time. The lesson: damage done to one is damage done to all. Silence is not an option.

Listen to a moving, solemn audio recitation of the historical poem here: Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First They Came” Recitation. Let the heavy gravity of the cadence underscore the terrifying reality of creeping institutional indifference.

📢 Ralph Nader: Unmanageable Noise

The US civic activist, Ralph Nader, reminds us that institutions never concede anything out of benevolence; they only bend when the alternative is too loud to tolerate. We have a duty to make noise. So much noise, constant and insistent but informed, that it becomes unmanageable for the state to control and it is forced and compelled to take notice and act. It is sound advice that we ignore at our peril.

🕊️ Chris Hedges: The Human Defiance

I will remember forever the opening of the television interview program hosted by Chris Hedges, a veteran, celebrated journalist, in which a voice-over commented on why “squeal we must,” even if we were mice facing powerful social-economic-political elements. Yet, even when facing a corporate-state monolith that feels impossible to defeat, Hedges insisted that speaking out was a vital assertion of our own humanity and dignity. He continues to practice this tenet himself.

Listen to the urgent philosophy behind this conviction here: Chris Hedges: “…but squeak we must.”

Chris Hedges “… but sqeak we must.” | Transition Studies

🎬 Halla Bol: Make Noise and Shout Down the System

I have borrowed and repeated this piece of wise advice from a 2008 Hindi film from India starring the actor Ajay Devgn, “Halla Bol,” literally meaning Make Noise. Produced in the radical street-theater tradition of the global south, the theme and message of the film are simply this: Shout! Raise hell! I believe that this is a message that we of the prosperous north with our many advantages need to pay attention to as well at a time when our democratic systems are turning illiberal, and our governments and public institutions are uncaring of public well-being.

Listen to the driving, passionate anthem of resistance here: Jab Tak Hai Dum – Halla Bol Full Song. The heavy, aggressive, rhythmic thumping of traditional street drums (dhol) kicks in, driving a collective chanting of a crowd rising up. The audio builds to an absolute crescendo, culminating in a unified, roaring chorus of voices straight from the film shouting: “Halla Bol!”

Jab Tak Hai Dum- Halla Bol [Full Song] Halla Bol

So, folks, come on, let’s make some noise.