Violent suppression of protest at Toronto's G20 – CBC documentary

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s report on the chaos, violence and mass-scale civil rights abuses at the Toronto G20 summit last year paints a damning picture of a police force out of control, using violence and intimidation to shut down peaceful protest.

It’s been eight months since the G20 and the iconic images are still with us — burning police cars, rampaging mobs, the massive security presence that according to the official story is all that stood between Canada’s largest city and chaos. But that’s not the whole story of Toronto’s G20. Astonishing new images caught on camera are now emerging and they expose a troubling new picture of what happened to hundreds of ordinary citizens caught in the huge police dragnet during those three highly-charged days last June.

Gillian Findlay presents a revealing new street-level perspective of what happened when thousands of police were deployed in downtown Toronto and instructed to do what was necessary to ensure the wall around the G20 Conference Centre was never breached. Exclusive eyewitness video obtained by the fifth estate brings to light startling images captured on cellphones and minicams by the innocent bystanders who found themselves on the wrong side of all that G20 “order.” In a rare television interview, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair explains why police took the actions they did.

The whole 45-minute streaming mini-doc is available at the link below. It’s strong stuff.

Updated to add: This video makes me ashamed to be a Canadian. Our national identity is so bound up in being “good” — respecting civil rights, being reasonable. Canada’s bad moments are supposed to be isolated incidents or distant history. But this looks like footage from Tunis, not Toronto. The idea that Toronto’s police chief doesn’t know about this and that he’ll somehow now hold the police to account now that someone’s told him that it happened is just so ridiculous on its face. If the Chief couldn’t even get his officers to wear their badges and nametags as they used extreme force against peaceful protesters, conducted warrantless raids, and made Auschwitz jokes as they jammed more prisoners into their detention cells, how can we expect him to hold them to account now?

You Should Have Stayed at Home

(Thanks, Bzilla, via Submitterator!)

(Image: G20 == Tense, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from salty_soul’s photostream)