Let me start off by saying that I’m new to Toronto. Let me also say that I am not new to agitating, protesting, chanting, picketing, reporting or defending civil liberties in general.
Once, I spent several weeks talking to and reporting about our local pride and joy: the prisoners at the Polunsky Death Row unit. All of the 400 plus men on the unit have been kept on 23 hour-a-day solitary lockdown (plus one hour of solitary exercise) since a 1998 prison escape attempt. Amongst the most disturbing of the stories I heard were the men who had been mutilating themselves just to get to the infirmary for a little human contact.
After reading that, your second reaction, right after the hollow pang of sadness was probably to hope I had a good reason for burdening you with that little factoid that you won’t likely be able to forget. Now try sleeping impotently on information like that for a few years. It fucking sucks.
And I did have a reason for sharing that. After a few years of carrying that weight around, I suddenly burned out. Pretty hard. Within six months, I had applied to and been accepted to a Toronto school, tolerated a lot of jokes that involved “eh” and “a-boot” and settled in somewhere around North York.
Why Toronto? It was a complicated and reactionary decision, admittedly. I am probably not naïve enough to have dogmatically imbibed Michael Moore’s caricaturistic depiction of Canada: a place where everyone leaves their doors unlocked at night, where illness has been abolished through universal healthcare, and where no one ever dies because there is no one to shoot at them. But something about the idea of the friendlier, less-troubled side of the border appealed to me. It was a place where I could study, make friends and not constantly have to confront the various blatant injustices whose presence had infiltrated every aspect of my life in the United States.
For most of the month of June, now that I had stuck my head firmly in the sand, news of the impending G20 conference barely penetrated my peripheral vision. Then, on Friday, June 25th, a friend suggested that we go down to “the perimeter” (just saying it is a little eerie) to check it out for ourselves.
June very nearly marks my 2 year anniversary in Toronto. And seeing those 8-foot high fences was the first time that my preconceived notions of Canada were seriously wounded. As I looked up at the fences, I tried to pull on the memories of my first experiences there: having my carelessly left wallet return unscathed, rationally discussing the various disturbing realities of the United States for the first time in a while, the culture of relaxed friendliness that helped me purge the anger and frustration I didn’t even know I was holding on to. But it didn’t help. There they were, looming, intentionally menacing along with the flashing images of similar fences in Israel, Germany, the Polunsky unit in Polk County Texas.
I wasn’t the only one shaken. Once I became accustomed to the scenery (too quickly for my taste) I noticed that my friend and I weren’t the only ones with cameras. Everywhere, there were phones and cameras clicking away (one elderly woman was even getting it all down on Super 8). And behind many of those recording devices was my silent, furrowed face suffering from the shock of a sudden paradigm shift.
But, like me, their focus was no longer on the fences – it was the police presence. We must have seen hundreds of them as we walked the perimeter. And never one at a time. Always in fives or tens, all of them looking, a little-too-intently out into the crowd. Occasionally, I saw a Torontonian saunter up to one of the heavily-armed squads and strike up a conversation. That relaxed me a little. This was still, in some ways, the Toronto I knew. The fences were temporary and things would soon return to normal. Turns out, those feelings were premature.
On June 26, 2010 I attended the Canadian Peace Alliance rally and march; partly as a sympathizer, partly as an independent reporter, but mostly as a looky-loo, curious to see how things were going to go down on this side of the border.
In 2001, I joined tens of thousands of other New Yorker’s in the streets to join another permit-sanctioned protest the Bush Administration’s aggression in Afghanistan. This time there were no dignitaries on hand to ‘protect’. I wasn’t affiliated with any organization at the time. A friend and I had gone as independent supporters and photographers of what we considered an important world event. We were on one of the well-publicized pre-approved routes, photographing a group sitting on the sidewalk, singing or changing (I can’t remember).
My back was to the street. Out of nowhere, mounted policemen rode their horses at a trot up onto the sidewalk. I was not the only one standing in their way. I was knocked down before I knew what happened. My ankle had been clipped by a hoof – I wouldn’t realize it until later – and I was on the ground, too disoriented to scramble out of the way of the second approaching line of horses. Luckily, a good Samaritan grabbed me by my belt and pulled me to my feet. I ran with him a short way before I lost him and my friend in the crowd. I limped all the way home leaving a line of bloody footprints behind me.
I tried not to think about that as we passed riot police at every intersection. I reminded myself that I was not in New York. That Amadou Diallo did not happen here. That the RCMP does not violate civil liberties so often that they have to print “To Serve and Protect” on their vehicles as a reminder.
And all in all, the protest was peaceful despite the unnerving police presence and the snipers on the roof tops. We marched along our designated circuit, turned when the expressionless faces of the battalions of riot police threatened that it was necessary. The only blip on my radar was the ominous stand of black-clad balaclava’d youths. Something about them looked familiar. I realized later, that they wore the same, walled-off battle-ready expression as the lines of riot police manning every corner along our route.
I got home around 4pm to catch the tail end of the US v. Uganda match. A ticker interrupted the first the overtime half to announce that there had been confrontations between protestors and police. I was incredulous at first. I told my boyfriend that it was probably just a few carefully-selected photos of a few protestors yelling at police to help justify the billion they spent to secure peaceful protestors.
Then I saw the video. The burning police cars were a shock. My boyfriend’s smug silence suggested that maybe the riot police were necessary after all. And he was not the only one that shared that sentiment. The next day, after reports of upwards of 400 arrests, some of them under the coverage of the dubious, previously-secret new police laws (including a raid on the U of T campus) we went to the local pub to watch Argentina spank Mexico.
After the match, the bar keep turned on the news. One woman was standing outside the detention center, explaining to the camera woman that she had been arrested while sitting and chanting in Queen’s Park – the designated protest area. She described some of the treatment of others she knew that had been arrested. How they were corralled and arrested while peacefully protesting far beyond the 5 foot perimeter around the fenced area.
One of the patrons, upon hearing her statement said “bullshit” loudly. The others laughed. The woman’s voice cracked as she continued to explain. The barkeep shouted “Shut up you stupid hippie”. Laughter again. I left shortly after that, but I could still hear them mocking the woman on the screen on my way out. My sinking feeling returned.
Back in Texas, when Bush first ran for president, not many people that I knew took it seriously. Even the news reports handled his poorly thought out statements, aggressive cowboy policies and religious zeal with a bit of mirth. But after he was elected, after the paradigm shift had taken place and it felt a little more normal, things began to change. Conversations drifted to the right. What was once seen as a violation of civil liberties was now a necessary precaution against ‘evildoers’.
The same people who were previously worried were now jingoistic, proud to live in a state that could protect them against the terrorists that might descend on southern Texas at any moment. I felt more and more like a stranger in my own strange state. And found it tougher to find anyone whose tone hadn’t taken a hard turn to the right.
I worry about the attitude toward “the protestors” (Once “Torontonians”. Historically, labels always change before an attack) whose grievances are rarely reported: women’s health, an end to the oil subsidies that helped to create the BP spill in the gulf, lower school fees. Dangerous things. Perhaps most dangerous of all is the running theme of the G8 and G20 summits. Since the practice of walling off the city (begun with the 2001 Genoa G8 Summit when 200,000 protestors descended on the city), citizens (that’s what they are after all) have protested the fences themselves as symbols of force and violence (have been); the treatment of the people on the other side of it as enemies; and its representation of the disdain that our elected officials (whose salaries we pay) have for us while making the decisions that will affect us all.
The voices in the pub were unnerving. The conversation never focused on the discomfiting fact that the suspension (temporarily secret) of civil rights can be exercised under the slightest pretense of a threat. Or the point that some of their fellow citizens were trying to make with their dissent. Unquestioning, they parroted the stance of the major media outlets, boiled down to a witty quip: “stupid hippies”.
Maybe it is because Toronto never experienced post 9/11 New York. Or any of the other places in the world where the threat of violence was used to suspend civil liberties a little at a time until there was very little left. Maybe it is your own naiveté and removal from the world of violence. I don’t know. But I sincerely hope that my doubts about this city are wrong. I hope that when it is all said and done, someone says “shame”. That things return to normal. That I do not realized that I have found myself in the United States all over again. That this is not really the new world order and I have no place left to go.
