City of Love

Harper's Photo Op

Almost a decade ago, when I was shooting a tv show for the Life network called The Goods, my friend and co-producer Martha and I had a running joke. Since the show was largely shot for budget reasons on the streets of Toronto, which we hoped to make look chic and interesting, but was not proving particularly obliging, we kept calling it, Toronto, City of Love.   

Contrast that to just two weeks ago, when the warm weather started coaxing people out onto the city streets and patios started opening up all over town for the World Cup. Suddenly it seemed that absolutely everyone you saw walking by was stylish and beautiful. The streets were harmonious and tolerant and wonderfully global, with couples of mixed origin holding hands, everybody with this wonderful hybrid hue of shining cinnamon skin, and fascinating new cafes and quirky bars and cool new places to hang out opening up on seemingly daily on every street corner. Suddenly the city was living up to its promise: everything looked cool and hip and interesting and full of urban possibility as if this city had finally caught its stride.   

Cut to this weekend, which started with an earthquake, police in riot gear muscling in on street corners, miles of steel mesh fences around “security zones”, flash floods and tornado warnings.   

By 6 pm last night, the security forces had effectively barred the people who live here from their own downtown. Citing violence, which by many accounts the police had allowed to occur to justify their own $800 million martial overkill, police in full on riot gear had fired tear gas and rubber bullets on the people in Toronto.  More than 600 people, some of them peaceful protestors, others simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or wearing black, had been arrested and held without charges. Many of these were held overnight or for up to 19 hours in cold open barred cells, Guantanomo-style, without food or water and without being allowed a phone call before being released in what was described as a “Catch and Release” strategy. U of T was raided, and 70 “anarchists” were marched out in handcuffs into police vans.   

Yes there was violence: police cars were torched and glass storefronts of banks and Starbucks were smashed. But there is no question that the violence was not only provoked by the week long amping up of security, it was also welcomed as justification for the security overkill. After receiving news of the peasants storming the streets outside his security bubble, Prime Minister Harper told the press that this was not typical Canadian behaviour. Neither, in my view, was the security presence. 

Thanks to Harper’s insane insistence that we hold the G8 and G20 here in Toronto, despite the obvious problems this would entail, Toronto, which was just starting to become a City of Love, is now a backdrop of burning police cars for Harper to flex his conservative muscle in front of the big boys. And one conveniently for Law and Order types to justify increased policing, security spending and limits on civil rights. According to reports, people who refused to allow police to inspect their belongings were arrested. People’s homes were invaded in the middle of the night by police without search warrants looking for “anarchists”. 67 closed circuit tvs, installed for the summits at considerable tax payers’ cost, now patrol our every move, and they ain’t going anywhere soon.  

It is now understood by everyone who lives here that the Federal Government does not like what we have come to love about our city, nor respect its attitude of mutual tolerance. Our Prime Minister used the opportunity for a self-aggrandizing photo op on the world stage that cost us not only a billion dollars in security, but our innocence.