A bittersweet win against a law that should never have been passed and is only now repealed long after it did its damage.
The Canadian Press reports, “The so-called secret law used to give police extra powers during the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010 will be scaled back to cover only court houses and power stations, the Ontario government announced Wednesday. …Critics say the law was used to justify mass arrests of hundreds of G20 protesters, and claim the province intentionally let people believe it gave police more powers than it actually did to stop and search people outside the G20 security fences.”
On June 25, 2010, the Council of Canadians highlighted its opposition to this law within hours of the first news reports about it. Just prior to our ‘Shout Out for Global Justice’ event at Massey Hall we headed down to the security fence (by the CBC Broadcast Centre) with a measuring tape and yellow duct tape. We measured five metres from the fence (the zone covered by the secret law) and then marked that distance with the yellow duct tape. Then we spoke to the media about our concerns (focusing on the loss of civil liberties in Toronto due to the G20 summit). Our report on that – with a photo of Council of Canadians chairprson Maude Barlow with the measuring tape – is at http://canadians.org/blog/?p=3532.
Several months later in December 2010, “Ombudsman Andre Marin released a special report into the G20…saying Toronto was under virtual martial law during the summit because of the secret law, which he concluded was ‘likely unconstitutional’. The law gave police ‘the power to arbitrarily arrest and detain people and to engage in unreasonable searches and seizures,’ said Marin.”
NDP leader Andrea Horwath stated yesterday, “The government has decided, quite some time after the fact, that they did violate people’s civil liberties and now they’re going to correct a law that should never have been put in place. I guess this is their mea culpa moment, and I think they should own up to it and be honest with the public that they made a huge mistake.”
The Canadian Press article adds, “More than 1,100 people were arrested in Toronto during the G20 weekend, many of them detained overnight in cages inside a warehouse, but almost all were released without charges. The Council of Canadians, Amnesty International, the Ontario Federation of Labour and individual activists were among those demanding a public inquiry into all events surrounding the G20 in Toronto. They say reviews by Toronto Police, the Ombudsman, the Office of the Independent Police Review and others haven’t been enough to find out all the facts.”
