Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been looking back at one of the pivotal moments in Toronto’s recent history: the shameless and brutal suppression of democratic dissent during the G20 summit, right in the heart of downtown. Today, I’d like to explore how the violence came to happen – and what we can do to ensure it never happens here again.

The G20 is an organization of the top 20 economies in the world, designed to promote “financial stability” and ensure “sustained growth” across the globe. It is, in other words, the beating heart of globalization and modern capitalism. As such, it attracts its share of protests.

It is beyond the scope of this column to critique modern capitalism from top to bottom. Suffice to say, it ain’t perfect. But what is within our scope is taking pride in our city and the people who make it great. And the way we were treated that weekend must never be allowed to happen again. Dissent and protest are cornerstones of democracy and civic pride. They are also explicitly protected rights enshrined in the Charter. The brutal suppression of dissent in Canada by agents of the state is not only shameful; it is illegal.

This is something you might expect in a repressive regime like Saudi Arabia – and it is a sign of the G20’s priorities that the group has selected the Kingdom, known largely for misogyny, imperialism, and oil, to host the 2020 summit – but for most of us, it likely doesn’t jibe with our Canadian self-image as a polite, friendly, and open democracy. Yet that self-image is, at least in part, self-deception to begin with.

The controversial practice of carding, including unconstitutional and highly discriminatory “random” stops, has only recently been curtailed by the province and the collected data is still in use. Violence by police officers often remains unchecked by police agencies; a recent case involving a brutal assault with a steel pipe was not reported to the SIU by the police until defence lawyers forced a report of their own.

As regards the G20, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking it was an isolated incident. Suppression of dissent is a trained, fostered strategy of police agencies across Canada. One notable instance involved police officers going undercover during protests in Quebec to act as anarchists, cause trouble, and invite further police aggression. There is no definition of “serve and protect” that calls for deceiving our own citizens in the pursuit of silencing their voices. Oh, and by the way – don’t think it can’t happen right here.

Of course, it could be worse. The time-honoured Canadian excuse is to simply take a certain amount of smug satisfaction through comparison to our neighbours to the south. But the time for excuses has long past. It is not the Americans we must compare ourselves to, but rather to the best version of ourselves. Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world, and we’re rightly proud of it. We pride ourselves on being welcoming, open, and free, and we would not be who we are without hearing and protecting a diversity of voices in democratic assembly. The best Toronto possible is a Toronto that listens, that learns, that cares. What happened at the G20 is not that Toronto. What happens daily across this city is not (yet) that Toronto.

What happens next is what can build that Toronto, for all of us and for generations to come.

As promised, here are a few ways that you can help to build that best Toronto and ensure that we never again let the rich and powerful dictate to us where we can and cannot move within our own city, using our own public servants against us. This is our city, not theirs. The Toronto police work for us, not anybody else.

1. Email Yasir Naqvi, the current Attorney General, and tell him that you want to see the 129 recommendations of Justice Michael Tulloch’s SIU report implemented immediately. You can read the report here, and you can email MPP Naqvi at: AttorneyGeneral@ontario.ca
2. Call your City Councillor and tell them that you are concerned about the lack of justice surrounding G20 police violence, and the potential for similar violence to occur. Ask them what they’re doing to hold local and regional police agencies accountable for what occurred during the G20 and to prevent it from happening again. You can find your City Councillor here.
3. Call your local Liberal party MP or riding association president and tell them that you cannot support their initiatives while Bill Blair, architect of the suppression of charter rights during the G20, holds a ministerial position. Demand that he be demoted to back bencher and ask them to find another candidate for Scarborough Southwest in the next election.
   

Next week, we’ll return with the final piece in our G20 coverage for this year. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know in the comments how your conversations with your representatives unfolded!

The post Toronto G20 Dissent Suppression Was No Mistake – Nor Out Of Character appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

In the immediate aftermath of the G20 Toronto, it was hard to make sense of what had just happened. I remember sitting in a bar with some coworkers, minutes after a confrontation with police, and watching my hands shake as I came to a deep and visceral understanding.  Born in Toronto but having spent much of my time growing up in a country where protesting the government will land you in jail, I have always been thankful for the rights and freedoms that we enjoy.  In a city as diverse and cosmopolitan as Toronto, you don’t need to look far to find people who have suffered under oppressive and violent governments around the world.  It’s an experience that instills a deep appreciation for the values and laws that underpin our free society and is at the core of our love for this city and this country.

It’s that love of country and community that motivated tens of thousands of us to go to a peaceful G20 march organized by a coalition of groups including teachers unions and environmental nonprofits.  We simply wanted to practice democracy by exercising our inalienable right to speak out against the government.  It is a right that is protected by law and a fundamental cornerstone of any free democracy.  But sadly, it is also a right that many take for granted.

I remember the day vividly. I was a UofT Poli Sci nerd and carried a sign that said “Infrastructure Investment Not Structural Adjustment”, a reference to IMF lending policies, precisely the sort of macroeconomic policy that gets discussed at conferences like the G20. And I had a pocket camcorder with me, a birthday gift from my grandmother, that I was using to document the day.

After the march, my friends and I returned to the “designated free speech zone” for protesters at Queen’s Park. It was many kilometres away from the perimeter fence around the meeting itself and a refuge for those wanting to avoid the chaos happening downtown.  But after the images of a burning police car spread across the major news channels, something quickly changed.

Seemingly in the blink of an eye, hundreds of police in riot gear arrived at Queen’s Park (where there had been zero violence or vandalism). I stood near the front of the crowd of protesters chanting “We Are Peaceful, How Bout You?” to a line of police that was forming in front of us. Suddenly, and without warning, a group of police burst out from behind their line, sprinting towards a man who had been standing around, holding a sign. I pulled out my camcorder and started rolling just as a swarm of cops pinned him to the ground.  Seconds later, one of the officers took out his baton and started beating the man on the ground.  Zooming in on his muscular arms and black nightstick, I captured this obviously unnecessary and seemingly malicious attack against a man who had done literally nothing but exercise his democratic rights.  Rising from a crouching position, the officer wasn’t wearing his name tag or badge number but as he took a moment to yell at the crowd, his visor was up and so the camera captured a clear image of his face.

Over the next 12 minutes, I kept the camera rolling, intent on capturing what felt like (and was later confirmed by the courts to be) an egregious and illegal trampling of our fundamental democratic rights.  For those of us who were there, we could see that what the police were doing was illegal.   But more importantly, we knew that we were bearing witness to one of those moments in history when democracy and the rule of law get sidestepped by the oppressive tactics of a government that wants to silence and discredit dissent. “The Whole World is Watching”, the crowd chanted as the police advanced on us.

In the end, I was fortunate. I wasn’t arrested. I wasn’t beaten. And I was able to leave the area with my camera intact.  Later, sitting quietly in a Bloor St. bar while watching my hands shake, I recalled that an officer had pointed a grenade launcher at my face (probably filled with non-lethal bean bags but that’s hard to recall when you’re literally staring down the barrel of a gun) and reflected on my lifelong assumption that Canada is a place where the police won’t beat you for speaking out against the government.  Had we, a bunch of global governance Poli Sci dorks, done something to deserve this treatment?  Had the violent suppression tactics used against us been warranted by our desire for greater transparency in IGOs?  Were we enemies of the state? Or were the police? What had happened to the Canada I thought I knew?

In the months that followed, the shock of the experience gave way to a slowly encroaching sense of dread that they had gotten away with it.  Public sentiment was on the side of the police and only a handful of local media were strongly pursuing justice.  It became easy to tell who had been there to witness the truth and who was only going off the dramatic clips of the black bloc.

One of those pursuing the truth was Rosie DiManno, the Toronto Star reporter who was covering the story of Adam Nobody, a peaceful protester who had been hospitalized after a particularly violent arrest.  Chief Bill Blair had accused him of being a violent criminal and suggested video of the incident had been doctored (he would later retract these statements and apologize). Months after the G20, I was reading one of DiManno’s articles and clicked play on a video.  What I saw was immediately familiar as the same incident I had filmed.

Upon realizing that I had footage that would be relevant to the case, I contacted The Star and arranged to meet with DiManno and an editor at their headquarters downtown.  Arriving with the camera my grandmother had given me, they watched the footage and we came to an agreement- The Star could have the video and all I asked was that they protect my anonymity. The truth is I was scared.  I had seen, with my own eyes, the anger and violence that this officer was capable of.  I knew that somewhere, he was walking around with a gun and a badge, part of a fraternal order of police that protects and serves themselves first and us second. I was afraid for my life.

For the next four days, the front page of the Star would carry stills from my video, alongside headlines like “What Now, Chief Blair?”.  Having shut down the investigation on the grounds that none of the officers could be identified, the new video showing his face was a game changer.  I was soon contacted by The Star, saying that the Special Investigations Unit and Office of the Independent Police Review Director had reached out to them in hopes of interviewing me.  Requesting the same anonymity the Star had promised, I agreed to provide the raw file of my video and speak with investigators.  A few days later, the SIU arranged to interview me in an unmarked white van outside my work.  Sitting in the backseat of that van, with SIU investigators who understood the seriousness of being a witness against the police, I felt vaguely comforted by their protection while simultaneously wondering if I would be murdered by the police for all of this.

In the months that followed, I began to have recurring nightmares about the officer. In them, he’d show up at my home drunk and angry. He had lost his job, his wife, his family, he had spiralled into alcoholism and blamed my video for everything. He still had a gun and he still wore that same expression on his face that I saw at the G20. The nightmares still happen.

The officer was charged with assault and his case prepared to go to trial, investigators brought me in to give numerous statements detailing what I had seen.  Eventually I was told I would be a witness for the prosecution.  I spent two days sitting on a bench in the hall outside the courtroom, waiting to be called to the stand. It was the first time I had seen the officer in person since the G20 and at that point my name was in the court records so he finally had a face and a name for the person who had exposed his misdeeds.

In the end, I was excused from having to testify.  Apparently, my various witness statements had been so fair and reasonable to the officer that they didn’t want to cross-examine me the way they had with John Bridge, who had taken the first video and whose credibility was aggressively attacked on the stand.  

So I went home. And I waited. For years.

The officer, convicted of assault, was sentenced to 45 days in jail but he successfully appealed. Then the sentence was changed to docking 5 days pay but he has appealed again.  The case, still going after 7 years, is now coming down to whether he should be punished at all or whether the stress and inconvenience of the experience is punishment enough.  

It is not enough.  With every fibre of my being filled with rage and pain, it is not enough.

Canada is not a police state. We allow dissent.  This may seem like an obvious platitude but on that weekend, a police state was in effect and dissent was brutally suppressed.  The people who ordered the crackdown have not been punished and the people who executed the crackdown have not been punished. There was no justice.

When politicians talk about curtailing our Charter rights as “balancing security and freedoms”, I often wonder if, for them, this is all just some hypothetical academic debate.  Obsessed with swaddling us in an illusion of security in the post 9/11 world, they ignore the real-world practical consequences of playing fast and loose with our most basic freedoms.  The real threat of things like Bill C-51 isn’t that it’ll be abused some day in the future but that it has a real and tangible impact on civil society today and every day it is in effect. Mass domestic surveillance is a frightening thing and has a chilling effect on community activist organizations.  Likewise, when police regularly infiltrate peaceful activist planning groups, it sows suspicion and fear amongst those who are fighting to make our country even greater.

What then, is the lesson we’re supposed to take from the G20 experience? That the government can spend a billion dollars of our tax money to brutalize us and we’re just supposed to take it?  That our fundamental democratic right to dissent is contingent on everyone behaving? That the rule of law does not apply to the police? (Old news for marginalized communities)

Democracy is not a passive activity.  Defending our rights and freedoms requires constant vigilance, especially in times like these. So when politicians like Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau speak of “Balancing Freedom and Security”, they’re accepting the violability of Charter Rights and Freedoms for the sake of security.  And in so doing, they are destroying with legislation what terrorists could never destroy with bombs or bullets- the very fabric of our democracy.

Luckily for the future, the G20 radicalized an entire generation of Torontonians.  You can’t make us sing “We Stand on Guard For Thee” every morning as kids and not expect us to show up when it counts.  And that’s what we need now, from YOU.

If you care about the future of democracy in Canada, here are three things you can do right now to send a message to Ottawa-

1. Contact your MP with this easy tool from Open Media
2. Volunteer or donate to Samara Canada
3. Tell Bill Blair to go f*ck himself-
   1. Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca
   2. 613-995-0284
   3. 416-261-8613
   4. https://twitter.com/BillBlair

***

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

-John F. Kennedy

Embedded below is Elliot’s video of the G20 Toronto protests, which was critical evidence in the prosecution case that led to assault charges being filed and a conviction (still under appeal seven years later). No other officer has been held accountable for protest suppression, and the person in charge of the operation is now a Liberal MP. Watch the video, and then take action following some or all of the steps suggested by Elliot above.

The post Lessons, Questions, and Scars: The Legacy of G20 Toronto appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

When I saw the news from Portland last month about anti-fascist protestors being kettled and having flash-bangs and pepper spray hurled at them by the police I got a familiar, heavy feeling in my chest. I felt it again when I saw disabled protestors being zip-tied and arrested for peacefully demonstrating against the Republican health care bill and when peaceful protesters were arrested this weekend on Parliament Hill. It’s the same feeling I get when I think about the G7 summit being held in Canada next year and the consequences of bill C-51.

It’s the same feeling I had when I was packed with no due process into a metal cage in a freezing cold warehouse with my hands zip-tied when I was 17 years old, and I still feel it every time I hear a siren or see a police officer approaching me. So if you are tired of hearing about Toronto’s 2010 G20 catastrophe, I want you to know that I am more tired of thinking about it. Unfortunately, we cannot and we must not forget about what our police and government were willing to do that weekend seven years ago; they have since enacted a law so that they can do it all again whenever they like and face even fewer consequences.

I protested at the 2010 G20 summit because the preliminary health plans that had been released included the global gag rule – an assault on a woman’s right to safe and informed care. On the sunday of the Toronto G20, after having seen the police brutality the previous day, I went to Parkdale, where a press conference about this police violence was being held. The press had moved from their original location by the library to a quiet side street where the police were arresting other innocent civilians and I was drawing peace signs with sidewalk chalk on the sidewalk nearby. My friend was next to me, blowing bubbles. There had been no violence, no aggression, not one hint of riot behaviour, when a horde of bike cops closed in like a pack of hungry piranhas, swarming across the street so no one could leave. Officers grabbed me by the backpack and dragged me to the wall to cuff me, and then after a search of my belongings told me that the saline solution they had found in my bag (yes, the kind of saline solution used to clean eyes and contact lenses) was a dangerous weapon and that I was under arrest for possessing it. About a half-dozen of us were scooped up in this kettle. A ride in the paddywagon across the city to Eastern Avenue later was when I learned how far the police are willing to go.

The first thing I heard when we entered the warehouse was people chanting: “We need food!”, “We need water!”, and “Courage, Courage!” from the Montreal contingent of activists. I knew from eyewitness reports that there had been mass arrests, but I was not prepared for the scale of the cages.

More than a thousand innocent people occupied them over the course of the weekend. The 50 000 square ft warehouse was packed with boxes made of the same square metal fencing used for festival fences, in a sprawling silver maze not unlike a massive kennel. Each cage had a porta potty with no door, and there were cameras positioned to see each one. My handcuffs were swapped out for a zip-tie, and I was put in a cage with about eight others. One woman in my cage had received no medical attention for the rubber bullet wounds on her abdomen and arm. Another was diabetic; she was lying on the floor, near faint and crying because they had taken away her insulin. I can’t tell you how many hours I was in that cage, but eventually I realized that I was the only minor there. The officer whose attention I managed to get by yelling down the “hallway” looked stricken when I told him how old I was and came to bring me to be processed shortly afterwards – none of us had yet been granted phone calls or any due process. An officer in a small trailer near the front of the facility told me I was to be charged with Possession of a Dangerous Weapon (the eye-wash). I told him that I was a minor and asked if by law my parents had to be informed that I’d been detained. He told me to “Think about them before the next time you go protesting”. (Note – my mother came with me to protest against the police five days later.)

Next I was brought to what could roughly be described as a changing stall, where I was searched again and my bra was taken from me because it too “could be used as a dangerous weapon”. At this point I was left in only a thin tank top, since my arresting officer had relieved me of my sweater back in Parkdale. I was brought to a row of much smaller cages against a wall, which resembled a dog pound even more than the others: this was apparently the minors’ section. The cages were perhaps five feet by five feet, and lacked the portapotty and camera features of the adult cages. There was one girl there when I arrived who was also 17, who had never heard of the G20 or cared about politics in her life. She had been on her way home from work when they snatched her off the street. We were soon joined by two more 17 year old girls from Montreal, who had been staying with their student group in a UfT dorm for the weekend. They were raided during the night, whereupon male officers strip-searched and violently arrested all of the occupants, adult and child, female and male alike. One of the girls had been assaulted by the male officer that had strip-searched her.

In the cage next to ours was a 15 year old girl, by herself. She had never read a news report, never been in trouble with the law, and hadn’t been downtown all weekend. Fooling around in a park on a Sunday evening was her crime, and she was terrified. On the other side of us were two boys, a gay couple aged 15 and 16. Neither of them had known what the G20 was either. I tried to talk to them as well, but an officer strolling by noticed them holding hands. I do not think I will ever forget their cries as they were violently separated and one was led away. These were innocent children.

What struck me the most during the hours I spent in those cages was the apparent joy of the police officers. They did not look burdened with their duty to assault minors, break the law, and traumatize peaceful civilians. They were not bothered by the cries or the kids begging for water and food. Some of them laughed as they walked by the 15-year-old crying in the cage next to mine. I can still hear her sobbing, and I can still hear them laughing, in an endless echo. The girls from Montreal were so scared that the police had killed their friends they were screaming their names over the tops of the cages relentlessly, begging for a signal that the people they love had not been beaten to death. The police were unfazed. People who had been kettled at Queen and Spadina, drenched from the rain they’d been held in, had seen the cops take a disabled man’s prosthetic leg and tell him to hop to the paddywagon; those arrested at Queen’s Park had seen police horses trampling family protests and officers using their bicycles as weapons against peaceful civilians. They had all removed their badges and name tags; this is why none of the particularly violent police could be charged for their crimes. We didn’t know who our attackers were. Most of us had heard the resounding thunder of the police banging their clubs against riot shields as they charged towards a peaceful demonstration. We had all seen the brutality the police officers sworn to protect us were willing to dole out to whoever was in the catchment zone of Toronto.

“Stay strong”, said the people in the cages as we were led down halls. “Courage”, called the Quebecois protesters’ voices when the crying from our row got too loud.

Once in the roughly sixteen hours I was caged, officers brought tiny styrofoam cups half-full of warm water for each prisoner, and once they dropped off a small pile of white bread with margarine and a kraft single on each. For vegans and celiacs, there was no food. The facility, being so large and having no permanent fixtures was very cold and in some places, the roof was not entirely sealed. The rain poured for hours, leaking down into many of the cages. The cold and lack of food/water got to me after a few hours and I became sick, whereupon I was taken to an empty cage to keep throwing up. Some hours into my isolation I was lead to a small room with a lawyer who told me he would have me out of there in no time; a few hours in a “release” section of the facility later (read: more cages but behind a wall this time), I was let out with no charge, no record, and no paperwork, only my bra in an evidence bag.

Three days after this experience, I watched my friends, family, and the media celebrate Canada Day. I curled up in a corner, shaking and  jumping every time I heard fireworks. Seven years later, it’s the same heavy feeling again when I hear someone talk about how free and caring a country Canada is. This country, this government, did this to me. This government made plans to do it again and wrote these authoritarian powers into law.

The things that I saw the police do, the things I couldn’t understand as a young kid who just wanted to protect a woman’s right to choose, have shaped how I see politics and society in my adult life. When the Liberals and Conservatives passed Bill C-51 I was heartbroken, and that heartbreak was only renewed with the recent C-59, which changes language in the law without changing much of the problematic substance. The same things the police did then – the search, seizure, and arrest without warrant; being held with no due process, explanation, or lawyer – all of it is within their routine legal power now. Information sharing between government agencies was not only left in the law by the Liberals’ “reform” bill C-59, it was expanded to include another new agency which the public will have no access to. CSIS’s powers to use information from any agency to secretly “disrupt” communication and financial activity, restrict movement, and damage property of citizens who have not even been suspected of a crime yet remain. These are all the tactics the police used to raid those Montreal students in their sleep, to snatch individuals off the streets who had done nothing wrong but merely expressed a political position in public.

There’s a lot of talk in C-59 about increasing the “accuracy” and “efficiency” of government agencies sharing civilian’s information, but no limiting of that information sharing. A few words were changed which can be up to interpretation by the authorities applying them just as much as the old words, and the powers to detain citizens for up to a week and non-citizens indefinitely without legal rights were untouched. These aesthetic changes did so little to alter the obscene threats to Canadians’ privacy and rights that the bill is already being decried as inadequate only days after it was tabled. Tim McSorley, National Coordinator of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, notes that “the government has yet to prove the necessity or value of either intrusive law” while calling for the full repeal of both C-51 and C-59.

This week as I watched Indigenous protesters being detained on Parliament Hill, the same feeling and the same memories hit me. I am scared for Canada, at the same time as I am inspired by those protesters and all others fighting for rights long denied by this establishment. I know how far the police will go; I know how far Canada has to go.

I used to think that what would have been best in 2010 was if no one had shown up – if we had only let them patrol the empty streets in battalions they would have seen how ridiculous they were. But what kind of city would we be if the images of that summit were of barren, militarized streets? My Canada doesn’t believe that what happened to me and 1,000 other peaceful people at the G20 was right. My Canada wouldn’t legalize that kind of dehumanization and violence. C-51 and C-59 allow for and legitimize terror against peaceful civilians who have committed no crime. These bills are contrary to the values of Canada and must be repealed to protect the rights of all  Canadians now and in the future.

The author of this piece has faced down the trauma caused by the event to share their experiences with us, in the hope that shining a light on the violence and aggression directed at residents and visitors alike during that fateful protest will ensure that we can prevent anything similar occurring again. As the author notes, that is not our Toronto. Keep following this series as we continue to explore the fallout from the G-20 protests every Tuesday through July. For more on how you can make a difference, be sure to see our “Call To Arms” column on Tuesday, July 18th, including never-before-seen footage that captures the brutality of the day.

The post G20 Toronto: Seven Years Later, The Trauma Remains appeared first on Toronto Guardian.