On Saturday June 26, the apex of the planned days of action against the G8 and G20, I arrived in Toronto with a busload of activists, students and steelworkers from Hamilton. Our bus disembarked at the Steelworkers Hall on Cecil St., and the day began with speeches, a free barbecue and re-connecting and reminiscing with protest friends from all across Ontario. The steadily pouring rain couldn’t dampen our collective enthusiasm, and we left for Queen’s Park at 1 pm chanting slogans, waving banners and passing out leaflets. At Queen’s park we excitedly saw our numbers swell to well over 25,000 people, as gropagebups converged from all over the city for the big People’s March against the G8/G20. I was covering the march for Mayday Magazine, a Hamilton-based independent publication, and had my camcorder at the ready.
The large part of the march wound peacefully through the core and back to the safe zone at Queen’s Park, while a slightly smaller group moved to confront the security perimeter that surrounded summit delegates. I was among the group that marched toward the fence, and wanted to document those individuals who were challenging the curtailment of free speech and legitimate protest that the security perimeter represented. Unbeknown to us at the time, an even smaller group of “Black Bloc” protestors were engaging in hit and run tactics that included making runs at the security perimeter, smashing windows of banks and multinational corporations, attacking the vehicles of mainstream media, and destroying four police cruisers that were suspiciously abandoned in the demonstration’s midst.
I connected with an old friend and documentary film-maker at the march, and we both moved to the front of the protestor lines, now stopped uneasily behind a wall of stone-faced riot police. You could barely see the security perimeter behind the police line, some three blocks away. With the march unable to reach the wall, and police unable to push back the crowd, a waiting game began. Protestors chanted “Let us in!”, “Too many cops, not enough justice!”, and my personal favourite “One billion dollars, wasted, wasted!”. Beside us a samba band drummed out a pulsing groove, and young protestors danced in front of the riot police, seemingly oblivious to tear gas launchers and rubber bullet guns aimed menacingly at them.
My Friend and I sat in at the front line for a few hours, before a serious need for food and a sense that not much was happening drew us away. We walked back down Bay St., pausing to eat shawerma on the sidewalk while we watched two police cruisers get creatively dismantled by a jubilant crowd. I had to be back on my bus at 6 pm, so I returned to the Steelworkers Hall. From what I had seen of the day, it looked like it would be a relatively quiet protest.
