The room was unassuming, small and on the lower level but the G20 policing hearings Wednesday and Thursday at the Westin Harbour Castle were a knockout.
Hosted by the Civil Liberties Association and the National Union of Public and General Employees, the event featured testimony from a wide variety of G20 policing victims, activist and otherwise.
The thing about Summit lore is that just when you think you’ve heard everything, you discover there’s a truckload more. I’d already sat through a number of shattering deputations at the police services board and was pretty certain I was shockproof.
But being in that airless hotel room Thursday gave me chills, and though I was dying for a cup of tea and a pee break, I was too rivetted to leave.
Sure, it wasn’t a court of law, no one was sworn to tell the truth and there were no sanctions for perjury, but the narratives were eerily similar. They were full of the confusion of the moment, with long explanations as to how the speaker went up this street and then that one.
There was minutiae and snippets of sensation: hearing people sobbing, worrying about getting back to one’s car, watching friends getting picked off, needing to pee, getting freaked by an officer’s personally hostile remark, endless panic about being trapped by police lines, being very thirsty in detention but not daring to drink the brown water. And on.
Civil Liberties Association lawyer, Nathalie Des Rosiers wasn’t perturbed by the meandering recitations she told the gathering she appreciated the meticulous attention to detail because it offered the stamp of authentication.
After a few hours, all the pieces seemed to come together – what we were hearing was the tale of an entirely off-the-map police operation, where officers were given frighteningly wide parameters and no reason to think they would face discipline.
As Movement Defence Committee lawyer Pat Oja put it: “what happened was not police incompetence something else was going on.”
Lawyer Paul Cavalluzzo told the room, that without the injunction he sought to limit use of the sound cannons, police were, pure and simple, prepared to risk the hearing of protesters. The ends, he said, simply didn’t justify the means. “Restraints on police are necessary or this will become a police state,” he said.
I’d heard the legendary story of the demonstrator with the prosthetic leg before – but there he was Thursday, in the flesh with a tale to make you gag. John Pruyn was sitting on the grass with his daughter at Queens Park, he said, when police swarmed, knocked him over, pressed his head into the ground, and told him he was resisting arrest, despite the fact he couldn’t move.
He told the hearing with a quivering voice that officers grabbed his artificial leg which came off, tied his hands and ordered him to put the prosthesis back on which was clearly impossible. One officer directed him to “hop” and he was, he says, dragged, thrown forcefully to the ground and eventually detained for 27 hours without charges.
Sean Salvati, not a demonstrator at all, but a baseball fan exiting the Rogers Centre told the hearing that what Toronto police did to him, he “would never expect for someone charged with terrorism, let along coming from a Blue Jays game.”
In a narrative that went from bizarre to horrifying, he wished an RCMP officer near the security wall “good luck” two days before the summit and was shortly thereafter, yanked from a taxicab. He testified he was taken to 52 division, dragged into an interogation room had his clothes ripped off and was punched, slapped and held 10 hours.
Valerie Zawilsky, a prof from U of Western Ontario described her arrest at Novotel and subsequent detention. She said she saw detainee after detainee arriving at the Eastern facility beaten up. The cages, she said, had no place to sit or lie and women who coplained were told they would be raped.
The final speaker, Zawilsky altered the tone of the affair by making a special plea to recognize the restraint of pressed and panicked demonstrators.
The Novotel sit-in, she said, “was the tipping point. I have never been so scared. The protesters chose not to resist they refused to be provoked. If anyone had thrown something, there would have been a bloodbath. I thank those people for their courage.”
