n December 2009, I moved back to Toronto after two years away. So I was here in June as the security fences went up, the protesters assembled in Allan Gardens, and the caretakers of the planet’s twenty most “systemically important” economies hunkered down in their harbourfront fortress. Though I situate myself ideologically on the socialist left, my relationship with street-level protest is pretty capricious. I’d like to see the G20 reconsider its mandate, or at least be held accountable for its policies, yet I remain dubious that marching down the streets wagging Magic Markered placards is the best way to wield political influence. But with the big show in my backyard, I felt compelled to get involved, if only as a witness.In the end, I meandered around the fringes of protests, retreating every few hours to bars showing World Cup soccer; at home, I guiltily — and, as things degenerated, obsessively — followed the events through various mainstream and alternative media. While surveillance helicopters made regular, thrumming loops over my house, what was transpiring on the city’s streets (and in its parks and private residences) remained distant. On Saturday evening, as riot police stormed the crowd at Queen’s Park, a friend and I stood by, goggle-eyed and powerless, watching people be tackled and handcuffed and hauled into unmarked minivans.
That dismayed, helpless voyeurism captured how I’ve been feeling lately about the world. As someone who enjoys a life of relative comfort and privilege, I benefit directly from many of the policies endorsed at summits like the G20. This inspires much guilt and a need to act, or at least atone, which in turn results in the sensation that I’m floundering against an immensity of problems, not to mention my own complicity in those problems. I believe in that old axiom “Think globally, act locally,” but my local actions feel limited and often hypocritical: cycling, for example, engenders environmental righteousness, but the mining practices that provide the aluminum for my bike have destroyed entire ecosystems — and human lives — in bauxite-rich places like Orissa, India.
Related LinkThe Real G8/G20: A Civil Society ResponseThis narrative seems to me inescapably violent, and I feel sickened, as an avowed pacifist, at my helplessness not only to oppose it, but to avoid supporting it. And despite my peacenik leanings, I was a willing member of the huge audience that couldn’t look away from the violence-dominated G20 coverage. That weekend, Toronto’s CP24 news station claimed a record 4.6 million viewers, while CTV.ca increased its readership by 169 percent. Sites like therealG8G20.com quickly popped up as an antidote to the paucity of attention to the “real issues.” But even so, it was the flaming cruiser, not the peaceful rally for indigenous rights, that became emblematic of the weekend’s events.
Months later, Toronto bears no evidence of smashed windows along Queen Street, nor any trace of the rubber bullets fired on protesters outside the makeshift detention centre on Eastern Avenue. Still, although I want, rationally, to focus on the “real issues,” the images of violence are what linger for me. Toronto feels like a house in which someone has died under mysterious circumstances: something sinister happened here, and, despite the veneer of order, it still lurks — creepily, spectrally persistent. And while the powers that be and the people who oppose them seek justice in trials and public inquiries, I’m left feeling confused; all I have are questions.
f you believe the reports on Toronto’s G20 weekend, everything about it was “unprecedented”: the billion-plus dollars spent on security, the number of arrests, the rampaging mobs, the use of tear gas on city streets. But for a contingent among the thousands who converged for this round of G20 mobilizations, those specifics, which shocked the rest of us, weren’t at all anomalous. Direct-action, radical groups like the Convergence des luttes anticapitalistes (CLAC) viewed those flaming cruisers and baton-swinging cops as symptomatic of the chronic aggression, devastation, and injustice perpetrated by the global elite. They readily engage it, often with oppositional force. On June 27, CLAC members Robyn Maynard and Jaggi Singh wrote:We live in a world which is defined by, and maintained by violence, a violence which self-interested G8/G20 leaders both perpetuate and deny. This violence is lived daily by those in the Global South. It is lived by indigenous people in “Canada” and worldwide, who face continued destruction of their cultures and environments by mining companies, mega-dams, and other forces of on-going colonization... In the face of this extreme social violence that is day-to-day reality, there can be no tears shed for the cars and windows broken by those who have had enough with the forces profiting from their exploitation.
I have always, from afar, admired Singh’s dedication to the anti-globalization movement. To many Canadians, the Montreal community organizer is best known for his run-ins with law enforcement. He was detained at the 1997 APEC summit in Vancouver (an official report on RCMP conduct later described the charges as “spurious” and “inappropriate”), and since then has been deported from Israel for working with Palestinian activists in the West Bank; arrested in 2001 for masterminding a catapult designed to launch teddy bears over the security fence at the Quebec City Summit of the Americas (the charges were later dropped); and jailed numerous times in Montreal after participating in everything from anti-war demonstrations to an International Women’s Day march.
Considering this precedent, it was unsurprising that, only days after joining fellow protesters at the Toronto G20 weekend, Singh once again found himself facing a warrant for his arrest. Charged as one of the alleged ringleaders of the black bloc protest, he turned himself in to Toronto police on July 6. Six days later, he was freed on $10,000 bail, under strict orders “not to organize, participate in or attend Any Public Demonstration.” He’d had similar bail conditions overturned in the past, but a reprieve seemed unlikely this time. After witnessing such a show of legislative and martial force in Toronto, many anti-globalization activists believe their activities are being increasingly criminalized.
Frustrated by the surfeit of public voices condemning the weekend’s violence rather than trying to interpret or understand it, I became interested in speaking with Singh. I was encouraged by his attempts to contextualize the Toronto G20, and I envied how sure of his beliefs he seemed. Here was someone infinitely more aware of and engaged by the same issues as I was, and yet just as compelled to act as I was inclined to wallow.
My sister Anna is a coordinator at the McGill branch of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group; Singh is her Concordia counterpart, and she put us in touch. Even talking to me was risky for him. Fellow accused G20 anarchist Alex Hundert received a warning from the OPP after conducting media interviews, and he was eventually rearrested after a public speaking engagement on September 17. But Singh, who called the possible suppression of his right to talk to journalists “outrageous,” was happy to talk. Since he isn’t allowed to use a cellphone, most of our conversations happened via Gmail’s chat function. (Even in simple communication, it seemed impossible to escape corporate hegemony!)
