Resign

As a citizen of the city of Toronto, the province of Ontario, and Canada, I want the immediate resignations of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and Premier Dalton McGuinty. If it were up to me, McGuinty's Cabinet would be forced out as well. If Prime Minister Harper weren't so clever as to have avoided direct responsibility for anything in the last five years, I'd want his job, too.

In a perfect world, both McGuinty and Blair would also be prosecuted for conspiracy to violate civil rights, actual civil rights violations, and as accessories both before and after the fact to widespread assaults committed by the Toronto police during the G20 summit.

Back in June, I told you about the outright perversion of the Public Works Protection Act approved by Cabinet, which McGuinty now admits was incandescently fucking dumb. Of course, this only happened after Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin issued a scathing report that called the PWPA invocation “illegal”, “likely unconstitutional” and “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.” I would disagree with only the last description. Pierre Trudeau's 1970 use of the War Measures Act was a far more massive compromise of civil liberties.

Six months after the fact, new video of the police rampage continues to come out and journalists are testifying under oath about the wanton police brutality that they witnessed. So far as I'm aware, no serious person has ever questioned the credibility or integrity of TVO's Steve Paikin. I'd personally take his word over that of hacks like McGuinty or Blair any day. Mike Brock over at The Volunteer - a blogger as serious as any you're likely to find - has a collection of videos depicting illegal searches and seizures by the cops well outside the "security zone", which expose the lies that the government and the police continue telling.

And the best that the Premier can do in the face of this is to essentially say "Whoops." Blair, who was actually born without a soul and is brazenly incompetent, remains shockingly defiant.

Again, there haven't been very many prominent stories about the Black Bloc anarchists being abused by Toronto police. The cops, however, did beat and otherwise abuse ordinary protesters, journalists, and innocent passers-by. They were temporarily freed of both law and constitutional constraints and they revelled in it. Because of an utter lack of leadership by McGuinty and Blair, downtown Toronto effectively became a police state for one weekend in June.

There is no escaping the conclusion that because of McGuinty, Blair and the Toronto Police, the Black Bloc won the Battle of Toronto. They accomplished their objective of provoking a complete failure of government. But they didn't create the now widespread distrust in the police and the government. The police and the government did that all on their own.

This is not something that should be excused by anyone. The first responsibility of the government and the police is to protect the rights of the people. If they are unequal to that task, everything else is meaningless because you effectively cease to have a democracy. When a government can pervert a law in secret - and the police can step outside of even those unlawful and unconstitutional bounds - without consequence, something profoundly disturbing happens to a free society.

I cannot remember calling for the resignations of anyone on this blog before. However, the events surrounding the G20 summit and its aftermath have demonstrated McGuinty and Blair's fundamental unworthiness of their offices. They both violated the public trust and were complicit in the physical abuse of those that they are sworn to serve. And they should resign.

Of course, they won't. Neither has the sense of personal honour to do that. And because the entire political establishment is lining up behind the police, there's no real alternative to them. Mayor Ford would simply name someone even more brutal and inept than Blair, and Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak probably regrets that McGuinty didn't go far enough.

But the G20 has to be the primary issue in next year's provincial election. McGuinty and Hudak don't want it to be, but the people of Ontario should demand that it is. Any candidate that makes supportive noises about McGuinty, Blair and the G20 debacle is simply unworthy of your vote. If that means an NDP government, so be it.

There now exists a dangerous precedent that civil liberties can be secretly and randomly suspended in Ontario. If that goes unpunished, it can and will happen again. Preventing that is now left to the people. There is nothing more important to a democratic society that civil rights and the fundamental freedoms of speech, assembly and security of the person from unwarranted government interference. Without those things, nothing else matters.

But if we're not willing to stand up and demand those things from bureaucratic thugs like McGuinty and Blair, we never deserved to have them in the first place.

The choice about the kind of society that we're going to live in is ultimately ours.