Two guys go into a bar. One, Kerry Diotte, is an Edmonton newspaper columnist who has criticized the cops. The other, Martin Ignasiak, chairs the police commission. His job is to view the police not as wisdom dipped in gold but a bunch of guys with guns who need civilian oversight.

What traitors those two men must be. Cops are tops, you know. So, there was a sting, in which seven undercover cops waited to see if their targets might, say, drink and drive, or worse. If these two were caught, they would be public enemies, their careers finished and every point they had ever made discredited. But even seven undercover cops — they claim a snitch alerted them (“Psst, there’s a guy in a bar, drinking”) — can’t make a target commit a crime if he doesn’t want to.

The two targets, attending a Canadian Association of Journalists event, unknowingly did the Canadian equivalent of standing in front of a tank at Tiananmen Square. They hailed cabs.

The tapes of the cops itching to arrest them are revealing: Of Diotte, one says: “I’d do his job and I’d do it better than him. A fucking idiot can write that up in about five minutes.”

This is what people often say about columnists, and in many cases it is true. I could write a column listing the many deficiencies of the Toronto police force with my left hand and tuck-point my chimney with my right. And I’m right-handed. It’s no challenge. They’re spectacularly ill governed with a truly terrifying union that still manages to have skin like organza. Anyone who criticizes them is made to suffer. Gosh, now that I think about it, they’re a terrific bunch of folks. They should get everything they ask for in the spring budget. Our city doesn’t need public transit. Really. We need a huge fleet of police helicopters.

Of course, I risk little. I don’t live the Da Vinci’s Inquest type of life that Kerry Diotte does. For one thing, I would not have been caught dead in a bar called the Overtime Broiler and Taproom. Normally, I am in bed by 10, dipping my nails in a hot milky drink and sipping a L’Occitane shea butter. Or is it the other way around?

As I loll, I read an improving book (not easy with greased and/or milky nails), which last night was Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder’s magnificent dissection of the East German secret police. At 1 a.m., the book dropped from my nerveless fingers; I haven’t read anything so fine since Orwell. You have your Homeland Security, your McCarthyites, your Stasis, your Edmonton cops, all living on snitches and revenge.

Here is why the Edmonton police’s apparent conspiracy against a free press is so unspeakable. It’s what the Stasi, the state police guarding the state against its own citizens, did daily, although with more success — Diotte’s cab driver would have been a plant, his mother would have taped his phone calls and his kids would be taking notes.

We are so carefree about our freedoms in Canada, even as our three levels of government follow the lead of the mad American government and drill into our privacy, gather data on us and spirit our citizens away to a dirt hole in Syria when it suits them. Remember when the feds invaded Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill’s home and targeted not just her hard drive but her underwear drawer?

This was classic Stasi. They would break in, steal underwear and store it in glass jars in federal “smell pantries.” The Stasi would take dogs to suspected dissident meeting places to check for smells that matched the “Worker’s Underpants,” as the jar label read.

Anyone could be plucked off the street, presented with knickers and told they would be let off if they become a snitch. There were so many snitches that the Stasi files, if placed end to end, would have stretched 180 kilometres. The Stasi would spray people with radiation, then wear Geiger counters to alert them to the presence of suspected dissidents. Young East Germans got cancer a lot. No one knew why.

A world of snitches is a world of fear. It affects your health and safety. For instance, all health insurers share data at a time when I am becoming increasingly certain that homosexuality will soon become a crime in the United States, as will abortion, profanity, childlessness and dirty dancing.

East Germany had a state-sanctioned dance. It was called “The Lipsi” and Funder describes it as a disturbing combination of a waltz, an Irish jig and a Greek teapot. Its point, she finally figured out, was that at no time in the dance did the hips move. It was a sexless, frozen-torso dance, state-sanctioned and enforced by the Stasi.

At the moment, Canadians worry a bit about privacy and police wrongdoing, but we have seen few explicit wrongs. Our shameful anti-terrorism laws, which allow “preventive arrest,” and the cases of Juliet O’Neill and Maher Arar are wrong. What happened in Edmonton is not a local story but an expansion of the abuse of government power, and it demands a public inquiry, but whom can Albertans trust? Firing the police chief is not enough.

However, if you are sturdily conservative and think men with guns can do no wrong, then The Lipsi is the dance for you. Sing along to the Stasi song!

Today, all young people dance The Lipsistep, only in lipsistep
Today, all young people like to learn The Lipsistep: it is modern!
Rhumba, boogie and Cha cha cha, these dances are all passé
Now out of nowhere and overnight, this new beat is here to stay!