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The G20 protests and judicial farce
By Thomas Walkom
Those who accused the authorities of criminalizing dissent during Toronto’s ill-starred G-20 summit got it only half right. As this week’s judicial farce demonstrates, the people in charge of public security during that raucous weekend went off the rails. They acted as if potential dissent were a crime.
How else to explain the numbers? During the summit, police arrested more than 1,100 people. Of those, some 800 were jailed – in some cases for more than 36 hours – yet never charged.
Of the 304 who were charged, the government now acknowledges that nine were fingered mistakenly. Another 58 more had their charges withdrawn or stayed Monday during a mass court appearance. The reason? There never was enough evidence to convict them in the first place.
In some cases, hapless Crown prosecutors tried to cover their embarrassment by striking deals with the accused: Pay $50 or $100 to your favourite charity and we’ll forget the charges.
In a standard court case, this tactic – a form of plea bargain—might make sense. But in this very political case, it’s hard not to suspect that the authorities were taking advantage of the fact that many charged without reason simply wanted the nightmare to end.
None of this is to suggest that all arrests were bogus. There was serious vandalism on the Saturday of the June summit weekend, much of which was graphically captured on video. The courts will eventually determine whether those accused of this vandalism are guilty.
But what seems increasingly clear is that in the wake of that Saturday mayhem, security authorities went over the top, expanding the very elastic provisions of the criminal code to arrest not only those who were protesting legally and peacefully but those who police thought might engage in such protests.
Hence the arrest of a uniformed TTC ticket-taker on his way to work. Hence the arrest of a 17-year-old for the crime of carrying eyewash in her backpack (police called it a “weapon of opportunity.”).
The little-used statutory prohibition against wearing a mask with criminal intent was used to arrest another young woman found with a common dust filter in her backpack.
Two National Post photographers were charged with unlawful assembly (the charges were dropped on Monday).
An American, caught on camera being wrestled to the ground by police, was herself charged with assault (that charge too was dropped.)
Perhaps the most dramatic mass arrest involved the decision to surround and hold about 200 peaceful marchers and passers-by at the intersection of Spadina and Queen – on a Sunday night in the pouring rain.
Luckily, this so-called kettling maneuver occurred within camera range of a local television station, whose minute-by-minute coverage so embarrassed Toronto police chief Bill Blair that he eventually ordered officers to pull back.
In effect, what occurred at the G20 was a massive and quite possibly illegal array of pre-emptive arrests. People were picked up and charged not because they were doing anything wrong – not even because they were about to do anything wrong.
Rather they were arrested and charged because those in charge of the police found civil liberties inconvenient. Their thinking: If everyone who might conceivably cause trouble is put in jail, there can be no trouble.
It is the totalitarian’s recipe for public order. Very China. Very Zimbabwe. Not very Canada.
Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.
Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/851905--walkom-the-g20-protests-and-judicial-farce