Welcome to the new Canada

If you want a glimpse into the ways in which Canada is changing under the Tory government, the police reaction to the demonstrations against last weekend's G8/G20 summit in Toronto is chilling.

These sorts of large scale demonstrations have never been handled well by the police: they showed a heavy hand at UBC in 1997 with their pepper spraying of demonstrators at the APEC meetings; police fired huge amounts of tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds at the anti-FTAA demos in Quebec City in 2001; the Sûreté du Québec were caught out using undercover agents provocateurs to instigate violence in Montebello in 2007. There's a continuity between these events and what happened in Toronto over the weekend, though I never felt that those responses were quite as repressive as what just happened.

The Toronto Star reports here on how the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is considering a lawsuit against the Toronto Police and other police forces involved in the mass arrests: "Of 1,090 people detained over the G20 period, 714 were charged with “breaching the peace” and taken into custody, according to police spokesperson Const. Tony Vella. All were eventually released unconditionally."

There was never any intention of pressing charges on the overwhelming majority of the people who were demonstrating/observing/reporting on/going to work/etc--the arrests were about intimidation, nothing more.

Here's one woman talking about how she was arrested, threatened with gang rape by the police, how women were strip-searched by male officers, and how one woman was sexually assualted by a cop while in custody. This is utterly sickening stuff.



Journalists were also targeted and were arrested and/or assaulted: examples are here, here, here, and here.

Here's an extract from an interview the Globe and Mail did with Toronto's police chief Bill Blair on the arrest of journalists:

But there are a lot of people saying they were just there to catch a streetcar, to go shopping, any number of different reasons, and they didn't hear any warnings.

This was not a site where somebody casually walked up to catch a bus. It was clearly a large and dangerous demonstration. It was clearly a situation that we were asking people to avoid. We were asking people to disperse. They ignored that request. When they were warned that if they remained in the area they would be subject to the breach of the peace, I suppose for some of them their curiosity – or perhaps their profession – compelled them to stay.

Are you talking about the journalists, in this case?

Yes.

I'm sure their feeling was that it didn't apply to them because they had all gone through the proper process. What's the point of being accredited and being there to capture this kind of thing if you're going to be asked to leave?

We took the extraordinary steps of containing that area and we asked the media to leave. They made choices. They chose to remain. And in choosing to remain they got hemmed in with everyone else and got wet.

So freedom of the press was effectively suspended along with the other freedoms. And then you have the police admitting that they deliberately misled the public on what powers they did or did not have. Or that their display of 'weapons' seized from the protestors was just as fraudulent.

And all of this to defend a summit where it was agreed upon--with no consultation with the public--that public spending cuts are necessary. I suppose the one billion dollars spent on security for the summit are exempt from these cuts.

But remember, the great moral benefit of capitalism is that it makes us all more free.

Happy Canada Day everybody.