I remember once believing in that motto: To Serve and Protect. For years, I taught children to always seek out a police officer if they were in trouble. They were right up there with ambulance drivers and paramedics and firepersons – people you could trust and who would come to your rescue. I remember when they wore friendly light blue shirts and red striped pants and drove bright yellow squad cars so you could find them easily.

That all changed in Ontario under Mike Harris and his right-wing police state. Under Mike's watch the uniforms changed to the dark side of the force, and the blue shirts were hidden under black flak jackets. The squad cars got a patriotic law and order make-over, some even into stealth mode with stealth markings. I remember a Conservative political convention that Boss Harris held in Toronto near the end of his reign of terror. The people had begun to protest, so he had the Convention Centre surrounded by police in full Darth Vader riot gear. It was like a scene out of a totalitarian nightmare – the SS keeping the elected elite safe from the people.

Something has gone very wrong when the people who are hired by us and paid for by us no longer Serve and Protect but, like that ominous Decepticon, seem to Punish and Enslave. It doesn't matter now who the political leaders are – the new norm is order by intimidation. There is a good reason for Julian Fantino's meteoric rise to Conservative federal Cabinet Minister, and it has nothing to do with serving and protecting.

Somewhere between corrupt Toronto drug squads, the killing of Robert Dziekanski, the ineptitude and brutality of the G20 riot response, police who lie under oath, and the overkill of Sammy Yatim, I have lost faith. If this is the new normal, like the radar traps out for the end of the month quota rush, I do not like it. I do not endorse it. Bring back Sergeant Frank Preston and Yukon King and Rex. I want a police force that makes me feel safe and secure. What you are doing now makes our children cry at night.

Skid Crease, Caledon

Given Stephen Harper's desperate need to change the channel after a spring fraught with scandals – election fraud, financial fraud, senate fraud, PMO fraud –  we all knew a Cabinet shuffle was coming. I took cerebral bets on the outcome and won most of them with a few glaring exceptions. Given the rules of political payback, the Prime Sinister had no choice but to keep the Mike Harrisites – Flaherty, Baird, and Clement – in the inner circle. Peter MacKay, who will eternally collect his thirty pieces of silver for turning over the Conservative name to the Reform Alliance posse, did a parallel career shift into Justice after being unable to defend his F-35 fiasco.

Another easy prediction – no senators allowed. After all, if you are going to try to toss the whole sober second chamber out, why bother. And besides, the stench of the PMO/Senate scandals did not fit with the happy tweeting about the fresh and innnocent new cabinet.

And no surprise for those who watch Power and Politics, that the young and photogenerational talking heads like Michelle Rempell and Chris Alexander will be now smiling for the camera from their new cabinet positions. Both had shown promise in the past but lately have demonstrated an inability to think – there is not much to talk about once you get past the glare of the Crest strip grin.

Now if a truly intelligent and independent thinker like Michael Chong, MP from Wellington-Halton Hills, had been appointed to the "new" Cabinet, it would have signalled genuine winds of change. Chong, however had previously supported Peter MacKay in the Conservative leadership race, went against the government's denier mentality in his support of the Kyoto Accord, and voted nay to Quebec as "a nation within Canada", all fatal flaws in the eyes of the PM.

Instead – in the first of my failed predictions – the hapless and synaptically challenged Pierre Poilievre, he of the now infamous blurt: "The root cause of terrorism is terrorists," makes it in as the Minister of State for Democratic Reform. Really? The thought of Harper's hyper-partisan yap dog trying to reform democracy is frightening indeed. This new position is a thinly disguised attempt to put Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy et al in a deep dark closet somewhere. Poilievre would best be assigned to the media room designing attack ads against anyone and anything slightly to the left of the extreme far right.

My second failure was in predicting that Peter Van Loan would be replaced. Astonishingly, he remains as Government House Leader, a continuing example of the bully-boy, bumbling brute kind of MP that Canadians have come to loathe. Sorry, Mr. Harper, nice try with the "generational change" shuffle, but you are obviously staying with the same predictable hand. And hard-working, tax-paying Canadians know your deck is marked.

*****

Skid Crease, Caledon