A song for Billy Blair. . .

AND THE REST OF THE G20 WEASELS. They arrested too many of the wrong people: middle class Canadians who are educated and have money — and lawyers. Billy and the weasels are just starting to realize that this problem isn't going away. I wonder how Officer Bubbles is doing these days? Anyway, the Pressure Is On. Great country blues: fine B-3, funky violin, guitar, great lyrics.

Interview with Alex Hundert

A guy so terrifying, a Canadian court has banned him from speaking.

Well here he is, interviewed in September.

boo-frickin'-hoo

If "Officer Bubbles" really wants to put an end to the shame and embarrassment he suffered as a result of his idiotic actions at the G20 being widely publicized, he might want to chose a different tack. After all, is getting  yourself saddled with the nickname "Constable Crybaby" really going to make things better? I'm sure this will make the other guys and gals in the squad room stop teasing him.

Tweet

The G20 Independent Review

~updated below~

Amusing CBC headline today : G20 independent review seeks public input

What will not be included in the 'independent civilian review' :

~ specific operational issues
~ actions of police forces other than the Toronto Police, including the RCMP
~ complaints about personal experiences with police officers

Former assistant deputy attorney general of Ontario Douglas Hunt will oversee the drafting of the review's terms of reference will introduce further limitations on a review which already has no legal power to effect any changes and has been cobbled together by a civilian group whose sole mandate is to provide policy and oversight advice to the police chief.

Please ensure you limit your "public input" accordingly.

Update : Things looking up. Ontario police watchdog Gerry McNeilly is to start his own inquiry into the almost 300 complaints against police. He does have the subpoena power and the authority to investigate G20 actions of police from outside Ontario as well - although RCMP not mentioned. In comments Mark Francis notes the Canadian Civil Liberties Association approves this one :

"The review will examine the systemic issues related to allegations of unlawful searches, unlawful arrests, improper detention and issues related to the temporary holding facility during the G20."

G20 Ten Most Wanted and their control group

At yesterday's presser, the Toronto Police media guy announced their "G20 Most Wanted Individuals" list :

"They are individuals who are not suspects - they are people who are wanted for criminal offences and the only difficulty that the investigative team has is at this point we don't know who they are so we're seeking the assistance of the public to identify them to us ."

He further advised they have "over 14,000 still images of individuals and over 500 videos", which they will be sharing with the Canadian Banking Association to run through their facial recognition software. Keep those citizen CDs and vids coming, he said.

So after ignoring the rioters for an hour and a half on June 26th in favour of taking their pictures, and then rounding up, photographing, and IDing over a thousand hapless random citizens the following day, you will now use the banks' software tools to look for a match between the two groups.
Got it.
Well at least we know the point of the Sunday bucket detainments now - they're to be the control group.

They probably would have arrested Don Ho, too

"If that bubble touches me, you're going to be arrested for assault"

-Constable A. Josephs, Toronto Police 

 Go see the video at A Creative Revolution, a blog that rocks, bubbles or no bubbles


Dear Constable A. Josephs of the Toronto Police,

You are such a dick.

Respectfully,

Rev. Paperboy

G20 : Who gave the orders?

Oddly, Media Co-op has an opinion piece up, criticizing Paul Jay for doing this opinion piece.

Meanwhile, in an alternate universe :

After an emotional morning-long debate, city council voted 36-0 to "commend the outstanding work" of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, his officers and other police forces working during the G20 summit in Toronto.

Then they all signed another one of those "Please, sir, can I have another?" greeting cards everyone is sending to Steve lately and fired it off to him, just in case he missed their endorsement of Lockdown Toronto on the news.

G20 : Maclean's does The Onion

It's been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn't it?
Inside - a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.
Outside - 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee's prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean's bravely decides to go for The Onion approach. Some highlights from Lock them up :

anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone ... arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements. ... The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

The Onion couldn't have done a better job.

Let me be perfectly clear

A few commenters and correspondents have accused me of supporting or at least giving aid and comfort to the Black Bloc Anarchist protesters who grabbed so much attention in Toronto during the G20 summit. Such accusations are, to use the mot juste "crap." My parents raised me much better than that.

I am most certainly NOT defending the brain-dead attention whores in the so-called Black Bloc, I think  they are childish tantrum-throwing clowns. I am criticizing the ham-fisted police response to them, which is not the same thing.
As far as I can see the police played right into the hands of this tiny group of dingbats in Toronto by letting them run wild on Saturday smashing windows and giving them patrol cars to burn and then turned around let the frustrated riot cops off the leash to arrest and even beat innocent peaceful protesters. Entire blocks were surrounded by the police in a strategy called "kettling" in which they seal off an area and arrest everyone in it, protesters, reporters, residents - anyone and everyone on the street. This is a violation of the constitution. Add to that the Ontario government passing last minute laws of dubious constitutionality, in secret no less, and the Toronto police chief adding his own illegal addendums and lying about what the law allowed his officers to do and you a have the results of the G20 on Canada. Previous use of agent provocateurs by the police, such at the Montebello summit two summers ago, have lead to a situation where anytime the there is violence of this nature at a major event, there will always be some question of whether the police were involved. Public trust in the police has been drastically eroded, and not without cause.  And THAT is what the anarchists really want.
In that sense, the Black Bloc were very successful. The police - who bragged they had infiltrated the group prior to the summit - did nothing to stop them, but fueled their antics by giving them free rein on Saturday and then used the damage they could have and should have stopped to justify an unconstitutional, heavy-handed response the rest of the weekend and as an object lesson to defend the ridiculous amount of money spent on security.
For the most part the television media lapped it up--pictures of burning police cars were all over the news and no one initially questioned any statement the police made.
One of your favorite journalists, Christie Blatchford, has been pushing this emotional story from Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair about how the black bloc protesters disrupted the repatriation ceremony in Toronto for a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Except that video taken at the event shows absolutely no indication of any kind of disruption occurring. This further erodes the credibilty of both the police and the mainstream press -- another win for the forces of stupid black bloc anarchist wannabe revolutionaries.
I am not a fan of the black bloc hooligans by any means at all. I think they are dangerous, have no agenda except breaking the system and offer no alternatives. Mostly, I think they are bunch of self-important grandstanding assholes and petty vandals. They consider themselves revolutionaries and  the job of a revolutionary is to provoke a response by the state, to get them to crack down on the population and thereby provoke antigovernment sentiment and expand support for the revolution. This only works if the state panics and gives the revolutionaries what the want by cracking down and pissing people off -- and that is what happened in Toronto this weekend.

If the cops had just done their job instead of playing PR and political games to serve their own ends, there would be about 50 of the Black Bloc  in jail for variations on the charge of aggravated jackassery, most of them with scrapes and bruises, the rest of the weekend would have gone smoothly and we'd be talking about how badly the government overspent on the summits. Instead, the police and government have sowed the seeds of increasing public distrust in authority and undermined the foundations of civil society--which is just what the Block Bloc wants.

Letter of the day, and Kelly McPoll-land finds a poll

First the letter :

"What is the difference between being told that you do not have the right to public assembly and being told that if you do assemble you run the risk of being injured or arrested? In the first instance, your right has been taken away. In the second, if you stay at home, you have given up your right. The only way to protect your right, therefore, is to assemble after all.

The caution to stay away came officially from the American government, but no Canadian authority contradicted this. The high fences, newly purchased crowd control devices and the assembly of an army of 19,000 security officers served to reinforce this warning, which was essentially a threat.

The most frightening thing that could have happened would have been if the streets of Toronto had been empty last weekend. That is the only reason I went to Queen’s Park last Saturday afternoon. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

No one is looking for any sympathy, but the next time there is news coverage of demonstrators protesting against a stolen election and being beaten by riot police in some Third World country, let us give thanks for the rights we do have. They will continue to stand up for us as long as we stand up for them."

Patrick Heenan, Mississaugaas
~as posted in the Toronto Star and tweeted by the Divine Ms Z.

Good letter, huh?

Meanwhile over at NaPo, Kelly McPoll-land is delighted to report that after watching the same footage of the same guy smashing a window on the TV news dozens of times every night, 1,003 Canadians told an Angus Reid poll they were disgusted by what happened at the G20 demos :

Poll finds G20 protesters blew it big time

Respondents were asked about their feelings about the demonstrations that took place in Toronto during the G20 summit.
Two-thirds of Canadians (69%) are disgusted, 59% are ashamed, 57% are angry, and 54% are sad. In Toronto, the proportion of respondents who reported negative feelings was higher (Disgust 81%, Anger 74%, Sadness 65%, Shame 61%)

Notable that even at NaPo, more than half the commenters below McParland's article pretty much agree with the feelings expressed in that poll - although for entirely opposite reasons - and a number link to the Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20 facebook page where over 36,000 members also have no difficulty at all articulating why they are disgusted, ashamed, angry, and sad.

Toronto Police Chief making his own laws

Not a police state? (Emphasis mine)

Toronto's police chief is admitting there never was a five-metre rule that had people fearing arrest if they strayed too close to the G20 security perimeter.

Civil libertarians were fuming after hearing Friday that the Ontario cabinet gave police the power to stop and search anyone coming within five metres of the G20 fences in Toronto for a one week period.

However, the Ministry of Community Safety says all the cabinet did was update the law that governs entry to such things as court houses to include specific areas inside the G20 fences — not outside.

A ministry spokeswoman says the change was about property, not police powers, and did not include any mention of a zone five metres outside the G20 security perimeter.

When asked Tuesday if there actually was a five-metre rule given the ministry's clarification, Chief Bill Blair smiled and said, “No, but I was trying to keep the criminals out.”

Chet is being generous when he suggests this is the result of incompetence. I tend towards intentional malfeasance on the part of the Chief of the Toronto police department who clearly disregarded the law and made his own set of rules without the consent of his superiors.

So we do have new rules. It was convenient for him to trample on the rights of citizens. Oh well.

Cause for immediate dismissal. With disgrace.

G20 : Who was that masked man?

A photojournalist followed and filmed 75 to 100 Black Bloc for 90 minutes and 24 blocks as they rampaged through the streets of Toronto smashing windows and torching police cars while police looked calmly on from several different locations. Why was this rampage allowed?

Police say they had already infiltrated a Black Bloc group and knew what to expect, but tonight the head of G20 security operations told an incredulous Susan Ormiston on CBC that the police had better things to do than attend to the Black Bloc.

So much for "serve and protect" then if you don't happen to be a G20 fence.

The photojournalist is interviewed here by Paul Manly, who shot the footage of the three rock-toting police provocateurs at the SPP protests in Montebello back in Aug 2007 and wonders if this isn't a variation on the same theme as it was only after the rioters dumped their black gear and dispersed into the crowd that the police attacked the peaceful protesters.

Well, perhaps not all of them dumped their black gear. Below some 20 plainclothes, including a couple of blackclad guys in hoodies, are seen making a run for safety behind a police line. An crazyangry woman attacks the photographer and then scampers off with them.

So who were those masked men?

Some things are just pure irresistable

I know what causes the Northern Lights and I am still mesmerized by them. But that's not what this is about. I will provide you with a series of quotes and a link.

I was sitting down on University Avenue, when a group of police officers approached me and said they wanted to talk to me. Stunned, I opened my mouth getting ready to reply to the request, when one of the officers at the top of his lungs yelled: "I DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK!"

Well... that's pretty fucking rude. I would have grabbed him by the epaulet and driven his nose into my upward rising hand. But that's just me. I'm actually trained to do that.

Another officer said they didn't want to hear about my rights.

Non sequitur. The other officer is a follower, easily dispatched, and your rights, won through successive governments and decades are no longer the issue. They're gone. Why didn't you just grab the "followers" wrist? That's a moment of shock and you can do a ton of amazing things to him in that moment.

They then proceeded to demand I remove the earphones from my ears, forcing me to get off the phone with my colleague. I told them I was on the phone to which another officer responded, "we don't care."

Well, no. I understand that. Everything now is about their life - not yours. You are nothing.

Then they said they wanted to search my bag, because I was "wearing a black shirt". To which I replied, that I did not consent to any searches. I told them that I would not resist them, and that any search they conducted was under protest. They simply said, "we don't care. We want to make sure you don't have any bombs to kill us with."

Oooooh. Search. So did you say, "I have nothing lethal or offensive in my pack and in order for you to search my PRIVATE belongings I require you to secure a search warrant because, constable, I have an implicit expectation that the contents of my pack are private."?

Did you do that? (Even though it probably wouldn't have made a difference).

They demanded I present identification, once again I complied under protest. To which they told me they didn't care again.

Not required. Check out that Charter thing. I never carry identification unless it is lawfully required - like driving a car or a 46,000 ton ship. You could have said, "I don't have any," which would have put them in a momentary dilemma.

Then one of the officers told me that, and I quote, that I (me) "don't care about the security of the city." To which I protested. They then called me "ignorant".

I hate it when that happens. It's almost as though they care more than I do. But then, they have their Master Agreement to make them look better. Calling you ignorant? I don't know. Does that demand future single combat? I think it does. But that's just me.

I asked them why they were using such vulgar language with me, and they simply denied that any such language had been used. Despite having literally sworn at me multiple times, seconds prior.

Ever been to a police bar? The language would curl your hair. I take some pride in that I can be so vulgar as to make them puke. It's a learned art. It's funny how cops so try to pretend that they are as tough as those of us who really do the tough stuff. Oh well. That's them.

There was one police officer, who was mostly quiet, who seemed to be looking at me somewhat sympathetically. I sensed that he was not comfortable with what his fellow officers were doing.

A liberal. Don't trust him/her.

But I was just subjected to an warrentless, suspicionless search, contrary to my Charter Rights. And when I protested my treatment, I was repeatedly told that they "don't care". They accused me of not caring about the security of Toronto, and they called me ignorant twice. I should note that I was never given any chance to really say much to them at all, so I can only assume that they had some prior knowledge of who I was.

Well, I don't know. The fact that they didn't care is relevant. No warrant, no prior suspicion, no probable cause. Goddamn, you gotta love this new lawnorder society. Fuck the Charter, at least until it fails to serve you, but let's face it, the damned thing only makes it harder for cops to catch the real criminals.

If you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to fear.

And if you want you can read Terrence Watson's uninterrupted posting on The Shotgun Blog, the home of Ezra Levant and KKKate McMillan.

Terrence's rights, no less than any other Canadian's entrenched rights, were grossly violated, and he has every right to complain. He is a Canadian and expects full protection from the possibility of an overbearing police state.

Let's back him to the hilt and make sure this never happens again. He just experienced the embryonic stages of a Hitlerian Canada.

If you're not doing anything wrong, the police can do whatever they want to whomever they want.

Hat tip Stage Left.

Vacant of thought; absence of innovation

This editorial in the Globe and Mail could have been so much more. The opener was tantalizing enough but then it wanders off into a minefield.

Despite the best efforts of radical protesters aptly called thugs, G20 security accomplished its most critical task. Summit work was conducted without disruption for the participants. But the same can hardly be said of its impact on the rest of us. The major disruption caused to the economic life of Canada’s largest city, and the staggering cost of the summit to Canadians generally, raise serious questions about the future of such meetings, and invites serious reflection about how to host a G20 summit.

And that's about where the navel-gazing started and the lint-picking commenced.

There is no doubt that the "thugs" commanded too much attention - both on the streets of Toronto and inside the G20 meeting venue. The truth is, they attract each other. While both groups purport to be out to save the world, neither is capable of doing so.

The Black Bloc are neither right nor left politically and I don't believe for a second that they are true anarchists. Under brighter lights they are little more than behaviour challenged children throwing a violent tantrum without a shred of legitimate cause. They're attention junkies, which makes them little different from the horde of overblown egos meeting at the G20 summit.

The sheer scale of the G20 – so many leaders accompanied by so many large entourages – makes it virtually impossible to host at a resort in the way that the G8 has often been in the past. [...] The problem is there are very few places in the world outside of a major metropolis that can accommodate 10,000 delegates, 4,000 media, together with the security and ancillary hangers-on associated with a G20 summit.

And that's where the G&M went straight off the rails.

The G20 leaders and the thousands who accompany them, will tell you that they are out to save the world. Except that, in order to do that, they have to meet in palatial surroundings, couched in comfort and savour levels of luxury, all the better to make the meeting go smoothly.

Never mind that the meeting was hardly necessary in the first place. Most of what was done at the G20 had been agreed upon well ahead of the arrival of the first delegates. The final results were as shallow as the fake-lake and nothing was binding. Further, the decisions by this group may well send the world reeling. These are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

That means the G20 will by necessity end up in large cities, a fertile environment for radicals, with plenty of support, places to hide and easy targets.

No... that means the authors didn't even think about how to do it differently. They also didn't acknowledge that holding a summit like G20 in a Northern Hemisphere city in June, after universities have ended their exam sessions, when the weather is good and the daylight hours are long, is just about as intelligent as taking a Guineau Pig for a walk through a pit of Boa Constrictors.

Unless the violence and heavy-handed security is something Harper intentionally manufactured. That's possible, but then Harper is another dull knife. He may be a master political manipulator but most of that is focused inward and serves to feed his over-sized ego. He only plays a long game if someone explains it to him first and Harper isn't much of a listener. He is, however, prone to impulsive, poorly thought-out behaviour and ideas as evidenced from things like the Alberta Firewall Letter, his addresses to American conservatives and his enraged response to the Chretien government's refusal to join the Bush/Cheney expedition to Iraq.

The police deserve praise for securing the summit site. Farther from the site, though, their success was less obvious. True there were no serious known injuries. True also the police showed too much restraint in dealing with the so-called Black Bloc, which ran amok.

The police showed too much restraint?! From any angle it is viewed, the police failed to protect people and property. And the coincidence of strategically placed, unattended police vehicles will continue to raise suspicion. It is not a stretch, at all, to suggest that the Toronto police, under orders from the ISU were running a strategy. They wanted that first rampage to happen. It gave them permission to behave through the remainder of the summit security exercise like Stalinist goons.

It’s important not to overstate what happened: too many windows were broken and cars destroyed, but the damage to property was neither massive nor widespread. Despite the mass police presence, Toronto did not become a “police state.”

Did the weekend at the lake without a radio or TV, did we? Police charged crowds who were doing nothing. They sent organized assaulters into peaceful gatherings of people. They threatened people who took photographs and videos. What's not "police state" about that? Not to mention the egregious secret law they felt happy to operate under.

But the lesson is clear. World leaders need to meet in sufficiently large but flexible groups to tackle big collective challenges – Skype is no substitute for face-to-face contact. And they must be able to undertake their deliberations securely.

Well, we finally agree, albeit only on one point. If they have to meet, and I still don't see the need to have to gather and thump chests like a bunch of old frat brothers out for a weekend at a high-priced sweat lodge, then doing so in a secure venue is required. A large city will never be a secure venue. At least not without trampling on the rights of its citizens and making a tacit declaration that the high and mighty, elected though they may be, will look down their noses at the revolting peasants. It is big brother wrote large.

This is the major conundrum: only major cities can host such gatherings, but future G20 meetings should not produce another Toronto, with its great security costs, massive disruption, and temporarily curtailed freedoms.

It is not a conundrum at all. It only remains so if things like the G20 continue in their present form.

This pack of bananas keep telling us they are out to save the world from... itself. They attach huge amounts of urgency and importance to the need for such summits. Only they and their huge "entourages" can do it.

Fine. Lose the luxury.

Let's see how often G20 summits occur when the meeting is held in the hinterland; when the accommodations are a mixture of portable structures and tents; when the fine dining is replaced by camp food; when a large number of the toilets for the "entourage" are porta-potties and the communications is provided by military satellite links.

Let's see if these people are so intent on saving the world that they are willing to give up the opulence of their privileged existences to do so. We might find out exactly how many of these clowns were actually necessary for such a summit and how many were only here to waste their own and the host country's taxpayer dollars to attend a weekend summer party.

G20 : The first rule of Fight Club is ...

"For the past few weeks, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said, it has been in talks with police to clarify the rules in and around the security zone: What are the rights of citizens, what search powers are police entitled to, and what should protestors be told before they go out to protest. They were told of a number of requirements, rules and laws that could be invoked.

But the Public Works Protection Act never came up, they said. Not once. Not even when the CCLA sent the police a version of the “Know Your Rights” brochure to review before handing it out to protestors as they geared up for the summit.
“They replied to us, but nowhere was this legislation even mentioned,” said Abby Deshman, a project manager with the CCLA "

~Toronto Star

Ignorance of the law is no excuse...

But if it has not been Gazetted yet, I cannot "reasonably" be expected to know it exists.

Harper : $1.1 billion for maternal healthcare

$1.3 billion to deliver it . (h/t Antonia Z)

Liveblogging the demos : Torontoist and The Star

The Executive Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has something to share with us.

His first-hand experience.

No amount of naysaying, no number of anarchist marches down Yonge Street, no volume of arrests, is going to convince the planners and sponsors of this event ever to concede in public – even a teeny, weeny bit – that this was anything but the greatest idea since the construction of Maple Leaf Gardens. In private, however, they may tell you how much it cost the city and its businesses, and the figure will make your eyes bug out.

It's all very educational.

G8/G20 The gift of spin that just keeps on giving

The problem with starting something spinning is that it will occasionally go out of control. Anyone who has tried to maintain a perfect heading on a gyro-compass knows this. Interrupt the source of energy and the damn things topple. Don't correct for latitude and you get a phenomenon known as "Earth Drift". Move the compass, as ships have a tendency to do, and you'll get a thing known as "Transport Wander".

You have to constantly pay attention to that spinning thing because the "North" it's pointing to is completely imaginary. Let your attention move off the gyro mechanism for too long and it's pointing to an imaginary point of its own - not the one you initially picked.

That's why ships always carry a back up magnetic compass. A magnetic compass always points at a real position on earth - Magnetic North. You can mess up a magnetic compass, but when you take away temporary influences, it will always return to Magnetic North.

The problem with the Harper conservatives is that they've been doing everything based on that imaginary point. Nothing is real. They're so into spin that they didn't pay attention to the laws of gyro-dynamics, probably because they don't understand such things anyway.

Thus, when their compass card, pointing to an imaginary position, started to wander a little, they didn't notice. When the need for a latitude correction arose, they ignored it. Arrogant people regularly do that. The result is that their gyro has toppled, leaving them wallowing around with no idea where they really are.

They could grab a magnetic compass, which is always telling a single truth, and apply known variation along with Harper's particular deviation to come up with their imaginary point again... except that they don't have one.

Now, even if they get their gyro up and running again, it's going to take a significant amount of time to find its rigidity and precess into its focus on that imaginary position (known as Harper's truth).

So, when the Conservative spin machine tries to point at some artificial object, calling it an "environmental legacy" intending to show everyone how green they are, they shouldn't be surprised at the calls of bullshit! from those of us in possession of magnetic compasses which are pointing at an urban privacy hedge.

Yo! Opposition parties! This is what an election issue looks like

Globe and Mail online poll G8/G20 May 29, 2010

Security for the billion-dollar boondoggle is being managed by ex-CSIS director Ward Elcock, who also just spent another billion on the Vancouver Olympics security.

Asked why the London G20 expenses clocked in at $30-million last year by comparison, Alcock answered, "Bookkeeping."

I wonder if we could possibly get some of that.