Toronto Pride

I hadn't realized that the Pride Parade originated as a protest following the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids. I would imagine the people involved in those first marches would never have believed that, just 30 years later, a million happy people now celebrate gay pride.

If you bought a car from IKEA

This is what you would get

plus instructions.
(From Mr Jam)
Oh, and that reminds me:

Hold your own hearings!

Notwithstanding that 35.000 people have now joined the Facebook group Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20, the recent Angus Reid poll now being trumpeted by the press would indicate that a government inquiry just ain't gonna happen:

When asked about the reaction of the police in Toronto to the demonstrations, two-thirds of Canadians (66%) and three-in-four Torontonians (73%) believe it was justified.

So there we are -- everything was the protesters' own fault!
Or, at least, that's what the Harper Conservatives and the McGinty Liberals would dearly like everyone to conclude.
Nobody died. Nobody's grandmother was tased. No cabinet minister's daughter was pepper-sprayed or arrested. Clouds of tear gas did not sicken thousands. There are no visuals of people being knocked off their feet by water hoses.
Instead, the visuals were of burning police cars and broken windows -- not exactly images which will enrage the general public about what police did, as opposed to what protesters did. And even though there is still a trickle of news stories about how confusing everything was, there are no editorials demanding explanations of how a billion dollars was spent, and why Toronto police chief Bill Blair has repeatedly lied about summit events.
So regardless of Elizabeth May and the Canada Day protests, the likelihood at this time that the Harper Conservatives or the McGinty Liberals would ever order a public inquiry into police actions during the G20 protests is zero.
If the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Amnesty International and Greenpeace and labour unions and student groups want to have an inquiry into police actions during the G20 protests, they are going to have to do it themselves.
Its been done before. It needs to be done again.
There are already some G20 stories written down already, if reporters happened to hear them, and there are already lots and lots of videos and photos already posted all over the place -- one of the most noticeable things about the crowd shots during the whole G20 weekend was how many people were photographing everything they were seeing.
Even without subpoena powers and a government budget, a narrative can be written about what went wrong during these protests -- hearings can be held, stories assembled, videos and photos pulled together, a timeline constructed,and the locations and participants documented. This will prove that police disappeared on Saturday when the cars were being burned and windows broken, only to re-appear later to pursue and arrest ordinary protesters and passers-by.
And may even help us figure out, why?
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the CCLA has already issued a preliminary report of their observations during the summit

. . . after 5PM on Saturday, the constitutional protection against arbitrary detention and unreasonable searches had effectively been suspended across downtown Toronto.

Who are you going to believe?

Christie Blatchford and Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, or your lying eyes?
Here's what Blair says happened last Friday during the repatriation ceremony of a soldier killed in Afghanistan:

“The Black Bloc was here and they charged up the thing [laneway], as a matter of fact the repatriation was kind of interrupted,” Chief Blair said.
“My public order guys ran through the lines that we had to close off the alley that they were trying to get up [to Grosvenor] with". . . he had to tell Sgt. MacNeil’s escort, “Sorry, it’s over, get out of here because it’s too dangerous.”

Thanks to Dave at Galloping Beaver, we now have photographic confirmation of these horrendous events. Here's a photo of the wild crowd that ruined this ceremony:

Here is a video of how disruptive they were:

WTF?

The boys defied the predictions and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, but I join the thousands of head-shaking fans at the stadium asking WTF -- too many men? Again?
Somebody on the Rider bench is suffering from dyscalculia.

Oh, Canada

I have sometimes thought this should be our national anthem.

Likely just another lie

So Toronto police leadership now say they knew by Friday that their "five-meter security zone" at the G20 summit was not an accurate depiction of the new regulation.
And they now say they informed their police officers about this change.
So we're supposed to believe that, at a time when journalists and newspaper editorials were talking about little else, and at a time when this regulation was radicalizing tens of thousands of protesters, absolutely none of the police officers monitoring the summit could be bothered to mention this significant change to any of the media or protesters?
Oh, sure.
Hung them out to dry, that's what they did -- their leaders knew police didn't have the authority they thought they had, and they let them rough people up and arrest people anyway.

Dumb dumb dumb de dumb

Shorter Toronto police chief Bill Blair:

Just look at all these terrible weapons we confiscated from the G20 protests!
Well, except for the crossbow and the chainsaw, we found those Thursday in the car of a mentally ill man driving downtown by mistake.
But everything else was ...
Well, except for the arrows and the chainmail and the shields and the plastic clubs. We got those Sunday at Union Station from a guy on his way to a fantasy role-playing game in a local park.
But its absolutelytrue that everything else was taken from protesters. Really! Would I lie to you?

I finally figured out who Blair is reminding me of:

Lies

So Toronto Police chief Bill Blair thought he had played a cute trick on "criminals" when he lied about police having the authority to detain and arrest G20 protesters outside the security fence.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is still furious about the way police behaved during the G20 protests.
But the people who should also be furious are the thousands of front line police officers who actually believed they had been given temporary authority to detain and search people at will -- who now find out that they were being lied to, as well.



UPDATE: And Blair is caught lying again.

Keeping Toronto safe?

Toronto police made a big deal today about they protected Toronto from Black Bloc violence by arresting 900 people.
Except, of course, they didn't.
On Saturday, the Black Bloc vandals were allowed to throw things at police, jump up and down on those artistically-abandoned police cars and then run down Yonge Street breaking windows and uprooting bricks unimpeded.
But on Saturday night and Sunday, even though I heard no reports of projectiles being thrown at police, no broken windows, no looting, no trashed cars, the police were very busy arresting polite teenage girls, Quebecers, reporters, and people shopping for groceries.
And now they seem to think that bullying people who were too scared to fight back was what kept Toronto safe.
According to the police chief, police arrested "dozens and dozens" of anarchists with "Molotov cocktails and other weapons" on Sunday --where these people are now, I couldn't find any news stories to say. I guess at some point, maybe there will be some bail hearings, and then maybe we'll find out just how many arrests of criminals and vandals were actually made. Until then, colour me skeptical.
Torontoist reporter Chris Bird writes:

. . . The cops had a disastrous top-down management strategy, to be sure, but over and over again the story of today was that some individual police were completely and totally willing to be bastards.. . . apparently guilt by association is the next big thing in Canadian policing.

Oh, and there was another large protest today -- to object to the police overreaction. Nobody was arrested this time.

The Canadian spirit is just indomitable.

The Dziekanski Lesson

Well, I guess we can conclude that the police have learned their lesson from the Dziekanski death.
And the lesson is, don't let yourself be photographed.
My friends in Toronto almost got arrested today.
They stopped to watch police arrest a teenage protester, and then they didn't "move along" fast enough to suit the police -- actually, they were talking to me on the phone at the time. So the police demanded to see the memory cards on their cameras. When one of my friends objected, the plastic cuffs came out.
To make things worse, they found my friends' arms were marked with a lawyer's phone number! And one of them had a bandana in her knapsack! That was almost enough to convince them that these were secret Black Bloc terrorist scum in disguise.
In the end, my friends were able feign docility and politeness long enough to listen to a lecture on the foolishness of being a protester, and then the police let them go -- but not before wiping the memory cards on their cameras.
The Dziekanski lesson has been learned: it doesn't actually matter how you treat the people you are arresting, as long as there is no photographic record of it.

Confrontation

Steve Paikin tweets what happened in Toronto this evening:

# i can appreciate that the police were on edge today, after seeing four or five of their cruisers burned. but why such overreaction tonight?
# the demonstration on the esplanade was peaceful. it was like an old sit in. no one was aggressive. and yet riot squad officers moved in.
# police on one side screamed at the crowd to leave one way. then police on the other side said leave the other way. there was no way out.
# the police just started arresting people. i stress, this was a peaceful, middle class, diverse crowd. no anarchists. . .
# i have lived in toronto for 32 years. have never seen a day like this. shame on the vandals
# and shame on those that ordered peaceful protesters attacked and arrested. that is not consistent with democracy in toronto, G20 or no G20

When a friend at the protests phoned, she said the same thing happened to the group she was with, in the late afternoon in Queens Park -- they were sitting down, not threatening, when police just charged -- no warning, no bullhorns telling them to disperse, just aggressive confrontation.
The Toronto Star asked Police Chief Blair about this incident and he gave this incoherent explanation:

Blair defended a late-afternoon police effort to arrest protesters who appeared peaceful at Queen's Park, saying some were black bloc protesters who had changed clothes.

I have been following the protest coverage all day on various blogs like the Torontoist and the Globe liveblog and I had been hopeful that police were going to approach these protests with a professional attitude. The police men and women on Toronto streets during the day seemed to remember what their role was, to protect the G20 summit but not stifle protest or provoke a riot. So they held back and, in spite of some media complaining, they let the unions and the anti-poverty groups maintain order and direct 10,000 people in a peaceful march. They didn't sweat the property damage, even to their own police cars (which were, for some inexplicable reason, parked in the protest path). They didn't go charging in with nightsticks swinging just to protect a few windows on Bay Street, even when the black bloc types were trying to provoke them.
But in the late afternoon, that police attitude seemed to change -- maybe they got new orders or maybe it was just a shift change -- all of a sudden police started acting as though they wanted to turn the protest into a pissing contest.
Come tomorrow, will both sides now think they have something to prove?

UPDATE: Is it the same shoes? Again?
UPDATE 2: Simple Massing Priest has an eerie video showing how the police acted today in targeting and arresting protesters.

You know what I like

I guess The Big Bopper called it right

Let the protesters protest

Based on the news footage I saw about the Friday G20 protest in Toronto, there were more police than protesters Friday.
That will not likely be the case Saturday afternoon.
Is there any possibility that wiser heads might prevail -- that police will back off, and quit taking a paranoid us-against-them approach, and just let the protesters march?
They want to file past that damned security fence, and make their point about international corporations, poverty, climate change, and global economic initiatives, and then go home.
Any chance they could just do this?
I think Canadians have finally reached their gag limit with the security overreactions.
Even Lloyd Robertson and Lisa LaFlamme looked uncomfortable when they were talking about the new secret Ontario law that basically criminalizes dissent and would have allowed wholesale arrests of G20 protesters at tomorrow's big rally. As Marcus Gee writes:

Canadians who are simply walking along the street are under no obligation to tell police their name or agree to be searched. “Papers, please,” are not words that people in this country need to fear.

Police -- who actually must be pretty bored, with thousands of them standing around day after day with virtually nothing to do -- are already abusing their shiney new law:

. . . once the erosion of rights starts, it’s hard to stop. On Friday, Toronto police were stopping and searching people entering Allan Gardens, a public park about three kilometres from the fenced off-zone where the G20 leaders are due to arrive Saturday.
“We just want to make sure you’re not carrying anything dangerous,” one officer told me, after asking for identification, as another flipped through my notebook.
The problem, it seems, is that anti-G20 protesters were having a (perfectly legal) rally in Allan Gardens prior to setting out on a march.
“Do you have anything here that might hurt me?” the officer said as his partner looked through my glasses case.
Some entering the park with banners or flags attached to poles had the poles seized. Some did not.

I get the uncomfortable feeling that they don't know what they're doing. And this doesn't bode well for Saturday.
Here's some photos of Friday's protests, all from 680 News Radio:

Now, THAT'S a protest!

In St. Petersburg, Russia, artists have drawn a 220-foot penis on a drawbridge to protest an upcoming International Economic Forum meeting.

Apparently, when the bridge is raised, it "glistens in the light".
Too bad Toronto doesn't have any drawbridges...