The G20 Assault On Canadian Liberties. One Year Later And Still No Justice

By Doug Draper

It was a year ago this July that I drove down a dead-end, rural road on the south side of Thorold, Ontario for an interview with John Pruyn.

I had no idea what to expect before I got there. All I knew, according to information I’d received from a few friends of John Pruyn, was that on June 26, 2010 riot police at the G20 summit in Toronto descended on him on the lawns around Queen’s Park – an area that was supposed to be a “safe zone” for thousands who gathered to talk about joblessness and poverty, environmental protection and a host of other issues. They tore his artificial leg off, bound his hands behind his back and dragged him to some warehouse that served as a makeshift jail where he was locked in for the next 24 or more hours before finally being let go without charges and without explanation.

Even with all of the mayhem many of us witnessed on the tube during the two days of that summit, Pruyn’s story seemed incomprehensible to this Canadian who grew up with a belief that in a democracy as mature as ours is supposed to be, we could collectively gather to express our concerns and that for those of us who gathered peacefully, the police would only be their to keep that peace, not assault it with plastic bullets, teargas, pepper spray and truncheons.
That belief, that we live in a democracy where we have the right to assemble without fear, was forever shattered with the events of that G20 weekend and with the account I heard down the end of that road from John Pruyn who, when I met this soft-spoken 58-year-old man, seemed about the last person in the world you would peg as hooligan or a trouble maker.

John Pruyn was a guy who was working full-time as an employee for Revenue Canada and had a hobby farm growing Christmas trees, for God sake!  He lost one of his legs years ago in a farming accident. And Pruyn, who joined the gathering around what was supposed to be that safe zone around Queen’s Park that weekend to hear speeches by citizen activists on issues Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper, U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders were wheeling and dealing on in a fenced-off compound several blocks away, became one of more than 1,000 people swept up in the largest mass arrest and arguably the worst assault on civil liberties in Canadian history. Meanwhile, a couple of hundred actual hooligans and anarchists, calling themselves the ‘Black Bloc’, were burning those cop cars and smashing store windows without much resistance from police.

It makes Pruyn wonder if the whole idea behind the police crackdown was to send a message out that we Canadians don’t have a right to assemble, if that assembly is about questioning the policies of our government in a global economy that has little use any more for acts democracy at a regional or national level. Why else would the riot squads spend more time going after peaceful protesters than the Black Bloc, he asks.

“What happened there,” said Pruyn in a recent interview with Niagara At Large, “is something that the police allowed to happen (and) we need a full and open public inquiry into it at the federal level.”

Pruyn said he can’t believe Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair still has his job and he doesn’t believe, for one moment, Blair’s recent report that the thousands of riot police he had in his command his command that weekend were ‘overwhelmed and under prepared’ to deal with the demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful and were not among the few hundred busting up property.

“They were all acting as a group,” said Pruyn of what he could see of the police riot that weekend. “They all had the same message. They were out to humiliate (and) they were out to say you shouldn’t be there. They knew exactly what they were doing and what they were doing was a police attack. …It was excessive police violence (and) they didn’t try to control the crowd. They were the ones who attacked it.”

Toronto Police Chief Blair, who apparently has the backing of St. Catharines MPP and Ontario correctional services minister Jim Bradley or why would he still have his job, had this to say this past month during an TV Ontario interview; “My response was determined entirely by the actions of the crowd. They became a mob and they began to commit crimes. They began to break windows, to burn cars, to hurt people and to loot and to steal. And when they changed their tactics we responded to those tactics. We believe our response was proportional to the threat.”

If that was the mindset of Blair, that the majority of these people were a “crowd” that morphed into a ”mob,” it makes one wonder what kind of marching orders he gave his policing forces before the summit weekend even began. converging on a “mob.” All the more reason to wonder what kind of marching orders he gave the police forces before they went out there busting heads.

When Bradley was invited to participate in a two-hour program CBC host Michael Enright hosted on his ‘Sunday Morning’ program a few weeks ago that focused on the G20 security mess, he declined. His boss, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, has repeatedly brushed aside calls for a public inquiry at the provincial level, arguing that it should be the federal government that does one because it was federal government that decided to hold the summit in downtown Toronto.

Pruyn said he is not hopeful the federal government of Stephen Harper will hold an inquiry now that it holds a majority of the seats in parliament. But he believes an inquiry needs to be held to expose for the whole country what happened on the streets of Toronto in June 2011 in the hope that it never happens again.

In the meantime, he is in the final stages of dealing with an Ontario human rights complaint he filed after his complaint and a settlement with him for the pain and anguish he went through may soon be reached. Diagnosed following his ordeal with post traumatic stress disorder, Pruyn has retired from his job at Revenue Canada.

He is not going to give up on what he feels is his right as a Canadian to peacefully assemble, however. “I will still go out (to public demonstrations),” said Pruyn. “It is part of my charter of rights.”

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