The most disturbing lesson learned from the G20 fiasco
The vandals and anarchists of the Black Bloc tried to prove a point. The police response helped them do it
The biggest question seems like a simple one: why?
Why suspend the Constitution, perform mass arrests and detain or jail hundreds of obviously law-abiding people — not just peaceful demonstrators, but seniors and preteens and journalists and mothers pushing strollers? Why do that?
And why do that, especially, given that it is exactly what your enemies wanted you to do?
There are plenty of questions that remain unanswered five years after the G20 in Toronto, now that the last of the major legal proceedings about the event has ended. But that’s the biggest one, for Mark Fenton and Bill Blair and the rest of the Toronto Police Service, and for the RCMP, and perhaps Prime Minister Stephen Harper, too — for all the authorities involved: Why would you do that?
Maybe we’ll never learn why, really. But we certainly learned that police would do that, in the face of provocation. It’s a lesson that’s all the more upsetting because it is what those who lit police cars on fire and smashed windows during the G20 wanted them to do.
The bad guys, the Black Bloc anarchists and vandals — the people Fenton referred to as “terrorists” — were trying to make a point, and the police reacted by proving it for them.
See, the peaceful protesters were the optimists, who gathered under the premise that our leaders — the leaders of much of the world — would listen to the people, would have to, if they gathered together in a large enough group with big enough papier-mâché puppets and loud enough chants of “Hey, hey, ho ho.”
This is the essentially generous democratic assumption behind all peaceful dissent: if enough of us speak loudly and clearly enough, our leaders will listen.
The Black Bloc do not share the faith that we live in that kind of democracy. And they make it their mission to expose that faith as misplaced. The point of their activities, which, if they don’t fit most people’s modern interpretation of “terrorism” (despite Fenton’s characterization) are certainly intended to be scary and chaotic and disorienting, is to provoke a reaction. They think the idea that police (and world leaders) serve and protect the public is a sham. Those authorities, they claim, only protect capital, and they only serve corporate interests and their own power.
And so while the innocent march and chant, the Black Bloc say to them and to the general public: if you don’t believe us, watch what happens when we smash some windows, destroy some property, light a police car on fire. See how your capitalist democracy holds up then, see how your constitution is applied, see how well your voice is heard.
What most of us would hope would happen is that police would protect us from the vandals sowing the chaos — contain the violence, prevent major damage and arrest those responsible.
What happened instead was that our police force turned on us: they disregarded the Charter of Rights, conducted unlawful searches, arrested many hundreds of law-abid- ing citizens who did nothing wrong on trumped-up charges, beat people up and masked their own identities while doing it, housed prisoners who were later released without charge in inhumane cages, and perpetrated what Ontario’s ombudsman found to be “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.”
One York Regional Police officer about summed it up when he was caught on video telling a man who didn’t want his bag searched, “This ain’t Canada right now,” and “there are no civil rights here, in this area, how many times you gotta be told that?”
And that was the most disturbing thing about the events of the G20. Seeing how quickly our authorities were willing to discard the whole pretense that we live in a democracy in which people have the right to assemble, to dissent, to speak and travel freely.
We learned that if a few dozen people set their mind to smashing windows and throwing rocks, the Charter is tossed aside, and everyone — including simple bystanders — is suddenly subject to arbitrary search, detention and arrest.
The Black Bloc, rioting and rampaging, were the bad guys. But rather than protect us from them, the police went out and proved the Black Bloc’s point by turning on us, and our constitution, and declaring “this ain’t Canada right now.”
If we were tempted to see that as a passing bit of temporary insanity from our police, we might survey the total accountability for it, five years later: a handful of cops docked pay, one temporarily demoted, one baton-swinging officer sentenced to probation and one supervisor, Fenton, who may retire before receiving a formal reprimand or dismissal for abusing authority and discreditable conduct.
After a force-wide lapse into authoritarianism, fewer than a dozen wrist slaps.
Maybe the big question isn’t why it happened. Maybe instead, it’s whether anyone can be confident it wouldn’t happen again. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire