httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
Two attacks upon the same crowd described in detail, including the use of gunfire now denied by the authorities, and the assault on a journalist already detained.
[Update] Toronto criminal lawyer Howard Morton discusses the arrest of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, what we know about police infiltration of the Black Bloc, and the Ontario Public Safety Act here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heb9BXjYcII
Police charge at peaceful G20 demonstrators singing “O Canada”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iaG1H0pDxY
After the jump, some unfortunately very shaky amateur video confirming what Rebick says.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3nCoNvldk
Police surround and then attack peaceful protesters in Toronto. In just about every video like this I’ve seen, they very quickly target people filming the event.
Catherine Porter of the Toronto Star explains.
Frye on police power:
But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. (Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 [November 1949]: 170)
June 26, 2010 A protester is overcome by the smoke after attempting to put out a fire in a police car at Queen Street West near Spadina during a protest of G20 Summit are held in Toronto. TORONTO STAR/STEVE RUSSELL
Eyewitness reports are circulating that, first, riot police allowed about 50 to 100 Black Bloc protesters to run amok in downtown Toronto for two full hours, even leaving three police cruisers abandoned at different locations to be torched; and, second, they then used the violence as a pretext to arrest hundreds of peaceful protesters and to deny them access to legal counsel. In other words, vandals were left to smash windows and torch police cars and the violence was then associated with those who had been peacefully protesting.
Judy Rebick’s roundup of eyewitness accounts here.
Video of riot police charging a peaceful crowd singing the national anthem here.
New York Times story here.
Village Voice story here.
Steve Paikin of TVO was witness to some of this and will apparently talk about it on his show tonight at 8, according to a recent tweet from him.
A collection of Paikin’s tweets on police brutality upon peaceful protesters and a journalist from The Guardian here.
Given that police provocateurs have been caught out before disguised as “anarchists,” it raises the question: Did anything like this happen here?
Stories providing a history of police agents passing themselves off as Black Bloc here, here and here.
Benjamin West’s “Death of General Wolfe”
On this date in 1759 General James Wolfe began the siege of Quebec which ended with his victory — and death — in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
Frye on Canada and Quebec:
Canadians, as I have implied, have a highly developed sense of irony, but even so, de Gaulle’s monumental gaffe of 1967, “vive le Quebec libre,” is one of the great ironic remarks in Canadian history, because it was hailing from the emergence of precisely the force that Quebec had really got free from. For the Quiet Revolution was as impressive an achievement of imaginative freedom as the contemporary world can show: freedom not so much from the clerical domination or corrupt politics as from the burden of tradition. The whole je me souviens complex in French-Canada, the anxiety of resiting change, the strong emotionalism which was, as emotion by itself always is, geared to the past: this was what Quebec had shaken off to such an astonishing degree. It was accompanied, naturally enough, by intense anti-English and separatist feelings, which among the more confused took the form that de Gaulle was interested in, a French neo-colonialism. This last is dead already: separatism is still a strong force, and will doubtless remain one for some time, but one gets the feeling that it is being inexorably being bypassed by history, and that even if it achieves its aims it will do so in a historical vacuum. I begin with French Canada because it seems to me that the decisive cultural event in English Canada during the past fifteen years has been the impact of French Canada and its new sense of identity. After so long and so obsessive preoccupation with the same subject, it took the Quiet Revolution to create a feeling of identity in English Canada, and to make cultural nationalism, if that is the best phrase, a genuine force in the country even a bigger and more significant one than economic nationalism, which is, as Mr. Mayo notes, mainly a Central Canada movement. (“Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada, CW 12, 450-1)
Clockwise from upper left: Mulroney, Peladeau, Teneycke, Harper
What we know is not promising.
Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who lied about his business dealings with convicted influence-peddler Karlheinz Schrieber, who took $300,000 in cash from Schrieber without declaring it, and who then demanded 2.1 million tax-payer dollars in compensation for a slander now known not to be slander, is on the board of directors of the Sun News parent company, Quebecor. More recently, Mulroney has also improperly lobbied cabinet ministers on behalf of Quebecor.
Pierre Peladeau, CEO of Quebecor, is an “ultra-conservative” whose Sun News division is in the doldrums and hasn’t turned a profit for some time. He is attempting to have the CRTC convert his money-losing Sun TV of Toronto into a Category 1 — or “must carry” — cable news station, which means that cable service providers across the country must make it available to subscribers and to pay for it even if they don’t want it and their subscribers don’t watch it. In other words, Peladeau wants to turn his unprofitable news division into a cash cow by way of a right wing news channel for which there is no demonstrable demand and whose income is guaranteed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year from cable subscribers who may want nothing to do with it.
Stephen Harper is apparently in on the scheme. We know that he secretly met with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in March 2009 and that he subsequently met with Peladeau, who’s also had access to at least three other high ranking cabinet ministers. This fact alone is staggering in its implications. A sitting prime minister evidently using his position to facilitate the creation of a right wing news channel to serve as the propaganda arm of his government — and do so, moreover, at public expense. Are there even words to describe this? Perhaps one: Cheney-esque.
Kory Teneycke, former communications director for Stephen Harper, is now vice president of development for Quebecor Media. Teneycke was also present at the March 2009 meeting of Harper with Murdoch and Ailes. This completes the circle. Teneycke is . . . Well, just consider these remarks on his Facebook page, as reported by Bruce Cheadle of the Canadian Press:
He lauds Glenn Beck, Fox’s anti-government conspiracy theorist, and makes note of a National Enquirer headline about “Obama Cheating Scandal.”
“The Enquirer has a remarkably strong track record on these stories of late… Tiger Woods and John Edwards. We shall see …” writes Teneycke.
And his edgy, controversial humour shines through: “To the pot heads who keep sending me crazy, profane emails: I hope (imprisoned pot activist) Marc Emery enjoys group showers as much as he enjoys pot. Three cheers for the DEA.”
Wow. “Lauds Glenn Beck,” promotes an “Obama Cheating Scandal” from the National Enquirer, and — in a particularly crude and mean-spirited comment — says of Canadian Marc Emery, now in U.S. custody, “I hope he enjoys group showers.” Geez, I wonder what that’s code for? This is a man with a lot of power and money and influence. This is how he talks about fellow citizens who have nothing like his advantages? Disgusting. (Note that Emery paid both provincial and federal taxes on his marijuana seed business totalling $600,000 before the Harper government turned him over to the DEA in May.)
Finally, Teneycke is now claiming that the association of Sun TV News with Fox News is just “critics throwing stones.” That’s a bald-faced lie. Teneycke himself has apparently been saying for years that Canada needs a Fox News, a sentiment that has been echoed up and down the line by other conservatives. Senior Sun News columnist Peter Worthington recently drew the same analogy between Sun TV News and Fox News. Sun TV News is to be Canada’s Fox News, and that’s evidently been the plan of all of these players all along.
If you haven’t already done so, take a look these two articles, here and here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjiwBwBL4Qo
Classified, “Oh . . . Canada”
On this date in 1880 “O Canada” was first performed, ironically enough, at a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony in Quebec.
Frye on his famous “garrison mentality” formulation of the Canadian character:
A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its moral and social values are unquestionable. In a perilous enterprise one does not discuss causes or motives: one is either a fighter or a deserter. Here again we may turn to Pratt, with his infallible instinct for what is central in the Canadian imagination. The societies in Pratt’s poems are always tense and tight groups engaged in war, rescue, martyrdom, or crisis, and the moral values expressed are simply those of that group. In such a society the terror is not for the common enemy, even when the enemy is or seems victorious, as in the extermination of the Jesuit missionaries or the crew of Franklin…. The real terror comes with individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against evil. It is much easier to multiply garrisons, and when that happens, something anticultural comes into Canadian life, a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow. The intensity of the sectarian divisiveness of Canadian towns, both religious and political, is an example: what such groups represent, of course, vis-a-vis on another is “two solitudes,” the death of communication and dialogue. Separatism, whether English or French, is culturally the most sterile of creeds. (“Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada, CW 12, 351)
The Dean of Sun News reporters, Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, cites Fox News as the template for Sun TV News. He’s presumably not one of the “critics thowing stones” that Kory Tenyecke complains about. As reported by the Canadian Press:
Peter Worthington, writing in The Sun, part of the Quebecor Media empire, welcomed the Canadianized Fox News channel. “Unless one views Americans as mostly mindless, rightwing nutbars, since around 2002 Fox News has dominated rival channels and has earned the title ‘Fair and Balanced’ that once went to CNN,” he said.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVaqV22MAeE
Kory Teneycke on the CBC, April 8, 2010
From Bruce Cheadle of the Canadian Press regarding Kory Teneyke’s Facebook page:
He lauds Glenn Beck, Fox’s anti-government conspiracy theorist, and makes note of a National Enquirer headline about “Obama Cheating Scandal.”
“The Enquirer has a remarkably strong track record on these stories of late… Tiger Woods and John Edwards. We shall see …” writes Teneycke.
And his edgy, controversial humour shines through: “To the pot heads who keep sending me crazy, profane emails: I hope (imprisoned pot activist) Marc Emery enjoys group showers as much as he enjoys pot. Three cheers for the DEA.”
More about Marc Emery here.