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“Is there no place now where Canadians can be spared the Conservative government’s jingoistic militaristic bleating with its conjured-up images of dangers lurking around every corner, nurturing the fear that “others” are out to rob us of our freedoms?”

Noting the presence of RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson in the grandstand, Koller wrote that the display of police hardware had some young children spooked and many adults bewildered.

“But Commissioner Bob Paulson, really,” he concluded the entry, “who takes their children to a horse show on a Saturday evening expecting a scene from an average day’s viewing on CNN of heavily-armed police working the streets of Ferguson, Missouri?

“The RCMP should be embarrassed.”

Koller is a musician, author and retired CBC broadcaster. He lives not far from the Musical Ride Centre on Sandridge Road and has often seen the ceremony, but not this version.

“I looked around and there were a lot of furrowed brows on parents,” Koller said on Monday of the crowd reaction. “We looked at each other thinking, ‘What the hell is this?'”

He said the youngest child in their party “cowered” in her mother’s arms. “You don’t do this in front of a bunch of little kids.”

He thought it was particularly inappropriate because it feeds into the “incessant militarization” of police responses all over North America to emergencies or crises in public order.

Photo by John Whelan / YouTube

Photo by John Whelan / YouTube

It was put to Koller that maybe this is the modern face of the RCMP, no longer a mounted force with lances and stetsons, but a para-military organization tasked with fighting terrorism in all its forms. The slaying of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and the attack on Parliament Hill, after all, were a mere eight months ago.