Because much of that money went to arming the police with a new arsenal of weaponry: water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets, surveillance cameras. I fear that we G20 protestors were just the guinea pigs. That those are the weapons of the future, designed to be turned on anyone else in the country who dares to resist the G20's policies.
And let's be clear that the resistance won't only be about cutbacks. Something else that happened at the G20 is that leaders decided not to make serious commitments to cut fossil fuel emissions. This was striking because after the failure of Copenhagen, there was much talk that smaller groupings of powerful nations would step into the vacuum left by the UN on climate policy.
But it didn't happen. Harper shut down all climate discussion because the Canadian government has every intention of massively expanding tar sands production. As we speak, Enbridge is trying to build the Western Gateway pipeline to bring tar sands oil to the West Coast of Canada, and TransCanada is trying to buy off U.S. farmers and threatening them with eminent domain to build the Keystone XL pipeline to bring that oil to refiners in Texas.
Harpers' is a bleak vision of a country. One that claws away at its own skin in search of fossil fuels that are catastrophically warming our planet -- only to send war ships to the Arctic to lay our claim to the oil and gas underneath that melting ice.
A country that then fortifies its borders to keep out refugees who lose their land and their homes in other parts of the world because of droughts and rising sea levels -- caused in part by our emissions.
We see this bleak vision materializing with the proposed Immigration Act, Bill C-49. If passed it would allow the Minister of Public Safety to declare any group of migrants coming in to Canada, a "smuggling incident."
If they are designated in this way, the state would have the power to jail them for a minimum of one year; deny access to health services; deny monthly detention reviews, and so on.
Which certainly puts what happened here during the G20 into some perspective.
But none of this will happen without a fight. No One Is Illegal, despite the legal attacks, is organizing a multi-front campaign to stop Bill C-49.
And the plans to expand the tar sands are hitting snags on multiple fronts. It turns out that after the BP disaster, when an oil company promises you that everything is going to be fine, it's not much of a comfort.
Everywhere the new pipelines are supposed to go into the ground, communities are organizing to keep them out.
In British Columbia, lead by First Nations communities, there is enormous determination to block the Gateway pipeline, just as the so-called Prosperity Mine was just defeated.
My point is simply this: our government knows that there are heavy battles ahead. Battles over what kind of country we want. Battles with tens of billions of dollars on the line.
These are fights we can win if we build coalitions like the ones we saw on the streets of Toronto during the G20: immigrant rights advocates with anti-poverty activists with First Nations defenders of the land with labour leaders and people who were just fed up with having their city taken over.
Our government fears those coalitions, fears the prospect of a truly mass social movement, and we can see that fear in the arrest and prosecution patterns.
It is no coincidence that the people facing the most serious charges with the most restrictive bail conditions are among the most effective organizers in this country. They are precisely the people who build bridges across traditionally separate communities and constituencies, finding common ground where there was often antipathy before.
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