Montreal’s police department, the SPVM, has finally crossed a line that they can’t very easily step back over. It’s not their blatant violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms while enforcing Municipal Bylaw P6, it’s not their mass-kettling of peaceful protestors, the SPVM seem to be getting away with both those infractions on our liberty.
No, this is something more heinous than even the most hardened recipient of police repression can fathom. It’s their choice of font. Yes, we have obtained a copy of an official document, a disclosure of evidence before trial for being at an “illegal protest” (which, for those of us that can remember a time before P-6, means being at a protest), and it is written in Comic Sans MS. Yes, the most hated of all fonts.
Katie Nelson is one of hundreds of people who recieved this document today. She is also the recipient of many other SPVM documents (she’s suing the city for political profiling) and thinks that the SPVM’s choice of font is indicative of the way our police department has been behaving.
“Comic Sans MS is friendly looking but an incredible violation of the art of calligraphy,” Nelson argues, “it may look cute with it’s rounded edges and curly js, but looks can be deceiving. Just like P6, which claims to ensure the safety of participants but is really only an unconstitutional anti-protest law intended to violate the basic right of dissent.”
Are we Montrealers going to stand for this. Comic Sans MS on official police documents is an affront to common decency. C’mon, this isn’t 1998, back then we had the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.
If we push and push hard against the SPVM’s use of Comic Sans MS and win, it will be a great victory, one we can all share. Maybe then we can get together and try to do something about P6, or at the very least, get the suspension of our basic rights in a font like Arial or Times New Roman, not Comic Sans MS, the P6 of fonts.
