The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is poised for sale to the highest bidder, and shareholders, not to mention company executives, stand to stuff their pockets from a deal when and if it occurs. The company has spurned as inadequate an offer of $38.6-billion (U.S.) from an Australian-based giant called BHP Billiton and has also been in talks with other companies, including two from China. The great and tragic irony for the people of Saskatchewan is that in 1989 a provincial government sold Crown-owned PCS for $630 million, a minute fraction of what it may sell for now. It’s like selling your house and having the new owner flip it for 60 times the price. What has this to do with a blog called Pulpit and Politics? Let’s start with the morality of greed, market fundamentalism, and the common good.

I was a young journalist with a ringside seat in Saskatchewan in 1975 when a government led by Premier Allan Blakeney took over half of the potash industry. I later wrote a biography of Blakeney called Promises to Keep and the potash story is told in that book. Potash (potassium chloride) is used as a component in farm fertilizers, which are in growing demand, notably in China and India, countries that have enormous populations to feed. Saskatchewan has the largest potash deposits in the world.

Multinationals on strike

By 1975 the multinationals that had been allowed to mine the resource were on strike against the province. They were in court saying that Saskatchewan’s royalty rates were unconstitutional and they also decided to stop paying their taxes. The companies were miffed when Blakeney, who came to power in 1971, insisted that the existing low royalty rates must be raised. He believed that the resource belonged to the people of province and that revenue generated from higher potash royalties could be used to pay for prescription drug, children’s dental, seniors’ and other programs. Blakeney had established a number of new Crown Corporations and he wanted them to become involved in joint ventures with private industry in oil, potash and uranium. That would give the province more influence over the pace and conditions of development and a bigger piece of the profit from each resource. Blakeney also believed that having resource company head offices in Saskatchewan would provide quality and well paying jobs that would give the province’s young workers and graduates a reason build to lives at home rather than leaving for greener pastures elsewhere.

The legislation introduced in 1975 gave the government the power to purchase and, if necessary, to expropriate potash mines. By 1978, the province had purchased three mines and had a share in a fourth. The industry lawsuits were dropped and PCS was on its way to becoming a successful mining company, which co-operated with private sector companies in an offshore marketing cooperative that exists to this day. David Dombowsky, the first PCS president, was plucked from Blakeney’s civil service and paid an upper end civil servants’ salary, likely less than $200,000 a year.

Privatizing potash
Blakeney’s government was defeated in 1982 and by 1989 a Conservative administration had privatized much of PCS. Erin Weir, a Saskatchewan native who is now an economist for the United Steelworkers in Toronto, says the potash privatization “was the worst fiscal decision in the province’s history.” The government’s public share offering earned $630 million, an artificially low price driven by ideology and cronyism and abetted by incompetence. The government and its supporters in the mining industry, not to mention the brokerage houses and law firms who made millions in preparing the privatization share offerings, argued that governments have no place in business, that a Crown corporation would lack the capital to expand the industry, and that private enterprise was inherently more efficient than a government owned company. These arguments have become ubiquitous since the 1980s and their constant repetition constitutes the mantra of market fundamentalism.

Economist Weir points out that mines owned by PCS 1989 still account for 80 per cent of the privatized company’s potash production and capacity. “Depending upon which assumptions one accepts, the costs of privatization exceeded the benefits by between $18 billion and $36 billion. In other words, the Saskatchewan government gave up between $17,000 and $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the province.”

PCS, privately-owned, continues to mine and sell potash and its head office nominally remains in Saskatoon, but anyone close to the industry will tell you that the nerve centre of the operation is now in Chicago. The majority of PCS shareholders do not reside in Canada. While they will profit handsomely from a sale price in the range of $40 billion, there is rarely a word about how the sale would benefit the people of Saskatchewan. As Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson writes, “the only debate seems to be about price.” In the minds of shareholders and most of the media, self-interest is considered to be synonymous with public interest, assuming the latter concept is even considered. In effect, there is no common good.

Corporate citizens
The Globe and Mail newspaper reports that, depending on the PCS sale price, Chicago-based CEO William Doyle, stands to gain between $400 and $700 million from his salary, severance and pension plans, as well cashing in on his stock options in the company. That’s a long way from the civil servant’s salary paid to the first CEO of the Crown corporation.

The chairman of BHP, which made the $38.6 billion offer, has made the usual noises about being a good corporate citizen in Saskatchewan and Canada, and keeping jobs and the head office in the province. Similar promises have been made by a myriad of other companies, including U.S. Steel, which promised to keep jobs in this country after a takeover but promptly closed Canadian mills. The Saskatchewan and Canadian governments have said little. The Saskatchewan Securities Commission will look at any offer that is made but appears under-resourced for so massive an undertaking. Columnist Simpson says the federal government, “goes through the motions” of reviewing any such takeovers and applying to them a “net benefit” test – but Ottawa never stops a takeover. Canada has lost Algoma Steel, Falconbridge, Dofasco, Hudson’s Bay Company and others, all in the name of allowing private enterprise to flourish. Ironically, if BHP doesn’t buy PCS the company may fall to the Chinese – and both of the suitor companies are government owned.  The Chinese would love to control the pricing and production of potash, a resource that they covet. BHP, for its part, has troubled relations with unions and Aboriginals in project locations and a spotty environmental record — in Papua New Guinea, South Africa and Northern Canada.

Collective purpose
Acclaimed historian Tony Judt (recently deceased) wrote that: “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.” A similar observation might well be applied to potash and other takeovers.

I travelled with my family in India in 2008 and my most useful guide was the writing of a Scot named William Dalrymple. This past spring we travelled in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan and found that Dalrymple has done it again in his book From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, which was first published in 1997. Dalrymple searched out and described Christian communities in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel (including the occupied West Bank), and Egypt. While the book is a bit dated, it remains a compelling and useful resource describing the disturbing reality that Christians are either being forced out or are leaving the countries that he profiles. The most accommodating nation in the region is Syria and even there Christians fear for their future.

Dalrymple says that the great flowering of Christianity in the Middle East began after the Roman emperor Constantine declared in the 4th century that Christianity would be the official religion of the empire. The golden age, embodied in the Byzantine Christianity, lasted for about 300 years, until the rise of Islam in the 7th century. During that time, Dalrymple writes, “the Levant was the heartland of Christianity and the centre of Christian civilization.” But he writes that Christianity is suffering “a devastating decline in the land of its birth.”

Dalrymple certainly is not anti-Muslim. He says that for centuries the predominantly Muslim countries of the Ottoman Empire practiced a far greater tolerance for Christians and Jews in their midst than Christian countries of Europe did for either Jews or Muslims. “Only in the 20th century has that tolerance been replaced by new hardening in Islamic attitudes,” Dalrymple says, adding that this is in great part due to a series of humiliations visited upon Muslim countries by the West. “Almost everywhere . . . the Christians are leaving,” he says.

At one level Dalrymple’s book is a travelogue. He seeks out the remnants of Christian communities from Turkey to Egypt. These are often monks living in remote monasteries but he also finds the beleaguered and usually elderly survivors of other Christian communities as well. In Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) he finds that descendants of the Byzantines continue to leave what was once the first city of Christendom. In Eastern Turkey, he finds that the Syrian Orthodox church has been almost entirely wiped out. Turkey continues to insist that the Armenian genocide never actually occurred and the state is attempting to remove evidence that Armenian Christians ever existed there. The few remaining Christians in the region are mistrusted and victimized by both the Turks and the Kurds, who are advocating, often violently, for their own homeland.

In Lebanon, Dalrymple blames the Maronite Christians for fomenting the calamitous civil war that occurred between 1975 and 1990. Following the First World War, the League of Nations granted France a mandate in the region and in 1920 the French carved the Lebanese state out of greater Syria. Dalrymple says that this was done at the request of Maronite Christians and was at least partly aimed at maintaining a sympathetic Christian beachhead in the predominantly Muslim region. Dalrymple says the Maronites were contemptuous of their fellow Arab and Muslim citizens. Rather than negotiating a sharing of political power, the Maronites chose to arm themselves and prepare for battle. Dalrymple says they lost that war and the stranglehold they had previously held on power. The war also provided an opportunity for the fundamentalists in Iranian-backed Hezbollah (army of God) to consolidate their power base in Lebanon and to add to the region’s instability. By the war’s end, at least one third of Lebanon’s Maronites had fled. Signs of the civil war still exist. In 2010, we saw people in Beirut living in the hollow skeletons of buildings that had been destroyed during the fighting years ago.

Dalrymple says that when the state of Israel was created in 1948, an estimated 55,000 Palestinian Christians were driven from their homes or fled — in addition to 650,000 Muslim Palestinians. In the 1967 war, Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan and they were placed under military occupation. Israel has undertaken a relentless colonization by creating Jewish settlements in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem. Early in the 20th century, Christians comprised more than half of Jerusalem’s population, but Dalrymple says their numbers have declined to about three per cent. Christians now make up about two per cent of the population in the country as a whole. The Israeli government, says Dalrymple, is systematically erasing the landmarks and history of Christian presence.

In Egypt, Dalrymple writes, the Coptic Christians experience discrimination from the authoritarian Mubarek regime and suffer increasing violence at the hands of Muslim fundamentalists. Dalrymple says that Christians in Egypt “are well aware that things are likely to get much worse if President Mubarek falls and an Islamic revolution brings the fundamentalists to power.”

It is in Syria, under another authoritarian regime, where Christians are most free to practice their religion and to participate more equally in society. It was in Syria that Armenian and Syrian Orthodox Christians found sanctuary from neighbouring Turkey. The northern city of Aleppo is home to hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians who provide a distinctive atmosphere in business, culture and cuisine. While there on a Saturday evening in April, we went in search of Christian churches and came upon a wedding occurring at the Armenian cathedral. The bride’s mother invited us to stay and although we had to decline we did see the wedding car a short time later decked with flowers and announced by blaring horns in the old city’s narrow streets. In Aleppo and the capital city of Damascus, the spires of Christian churches dot the skyline along with the minarets of mosques and we heard the tolling of church bells as well as the frequent calls to Muslim prayer.

Dalrymple says that Syria has been a “Noah’s ark” of shelter and safety for Christians but that to some extent there is a Machiavellian reason for it. Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in 1970, was an Alawite, a Muslim minority within Syria that is considered heretical by the majority Sunni population. Hassad remained in power and ruled with ruthless authority by forming an informal coalition of religious minority groups including the Christians who form about 10 per cent of Syria’s population. Hassad died in 2000 and his son Bashare took over for him. Dalrymple says that Syrian Christians fear that they may suffer a savage backlash when and if the Assad dynasty falls — and he reports anecdotally that those Syrian Christians who can afford it are attempting to obtain second passports as a precaution.

Dalrymple believes that the disappearance of Christians from the Middle East has important consequences beyond the stories of discrimination and violence that so many people have experienced. He quotes from his interview with Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi, author of the classic book A House of Many Mansions. “Since the 19th century the Christian Arabs have played a vital role in defining a secular Arab cultural identity,” Salibi told Dalrymple in an interview. “It is no coincidence that most of the founders of secular Arab nationalism were Christians . . . If Christian Arabs continue to emigrate, the Arabs will be in a much more difficult position to defend the Arab world against Islamism . . . Everyone is frightened by the spread of fundamentalism.”

One reviewer has said that Dalrymple’s book is not an optimistic one about the future of Christians in the Middle East — and it is not. Yet, Dalrymple reminds us of the great similarities between the two world religions: “Today the West often views Islam as a civilization very different from and innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realize how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s Western incarnation.”

France’s National Assembly recently approved a bill that would make it illegal to wear in public garments such as the niqab or burqa, which incorporate a full-face veil. Similar laws are in force or being contemplated in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. Supporters of the legislation say that veils are a provocative symbol of Muslim fundamentalism that has no place in a secular country. They say as well that the veil is more of a cultural than a religious symbol and that it is not essential to Muslim worship. Those who would do away with the veil see themselves as liberating women from a certain oppressive interpretation of Islam. On the other hand, opponents of the legislation say that it is discriminatory against Muslims, that it offends religious liberty, and that it is not the business of the state to tell people how they should dress.

Only a tiny minority of Muslim women wear full face coverings in Europe and North America but the veil has become a potent political issue in Europe, with a resonance in Canada. A Leger on-line poll released in July found that 54% of respondents believe that Canada should ban the face veil as well. In Quebec, 73% of respondents want wearing of the veil to be banned.

Martha Nussbaum, who teaches at The University of Chicago, has written (in the New York Times) one of the more intelligent articles regarding the controversy. Nussbaum says that banning women from wearing face veils is “utterly unacceptable in a society committed to equal liberty.” Nussbaum bases her argument on both religious liberty and on practical, secular observations. She says there is a long tradition (in America) holding that there must be special accommodations made to protect the freedom of conscience and religious freedom of the “minority believer.” She also argues that laws about face veils are clearly aimed Muslims and not other groups. In some European countries, she says, public school teachers are banned from wearing face veils on the job although nuns and priests are permitted to teach in full habit.

Catholic nuns were covered

I have more than passing familiarity with the classroom attire of nuns and priests because I was taught by religious sisters in primary school and by Catholic monks in high school. When I was a student in the 1950s and 60s, the sisters wore black habits that covered them from neck to ankle. They also wore starched bibs and veils that covered their chests, heads and foreheads. The only parts of their bodies visible was their face from eyes to chin and also their hands. The photo of sisters shown here is taken from a book called Everett Baker’s Saskatchewan, selected and introduced by historian Bill Waiser. The sisters who taught me dressed in much the same manner and no one in my largely Catholic community thought this to be at all out of the ordinary.

There was an earlier time, however, when sisters’ garb was a hot political issue, similar in some ways to the controversy today regarding the face veil. In the mid 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was active in Saskatchewan and promoted an agenda of anti-Catholicism and opposition to immigration from anywhere but the British Isles. A Conservative coalition government led by J.T.M. Anderson was elected in 1930 and quickly passed laws prohibiting the display of religious symbols and the wearing of religious dress in public schools. Most of Saskatchewan’s schools were public, even in cases where the local population was mainly Catholic and where the teachers were sisters or priests. Anderson’s administration was a one-term government but Catholics did not forgive the Conservatives for more than 50 years and generally supported the Liberals throughout that time.

Banning veil unacceptable

Nussbaum would likely have opposed the banning of religious garb in schools. Today she argues that banning the veil is unbecoming of a liberal democratic society. She says that a number of arguments are commonly made in favour of proposed bans and she deals with each in turn. Let’s summarize her arguments, in her own words:

First, is the argument that security requires people to show their faces when appearing in public places. A second, related, argument says that covering part of the face impedes transparency and reciprocity proper to relations between citizens. Nussbaum says these arguments are applied inconsistently. The weather can get cold in North America and Europe and people often walk with hats pulled down over ears and brows, scarves wound tightly around noses and mouths.  Yet those people walk the streets freely and no one stops them from entering public buildings in the name of transparency or security. As well, many others in society cover their faces all year round: surgeons, dentists, football players, skiers and skaters. Nussbaum writes, “What inspires fear and mistrust in Europe, clearly, is not covering per se, but Muslim covering . . . a reasonable demand might be that a Muslim woman has a full face photo on her driver’s license or passport.”

Nussbaum says a third argument against the burqa is that it is a symbol of male domination that symbolizes the objectification of women. “The glaring flaw in the argument,” she writes, “is that society is suffused with symbols of male supremacy that treat women as objects. Sex magazines, nude photos, tight jeans — all of these products, arguably, treat women as objects, as do so many aspects of our media culture. Proponents of the burqa ban do not propose to ban all these objectifying practices. Indeed, they often participate in them. And banning all such practices on a basis of equality would be an intolerable invasion of liberty.”

A fourth argument holds that women wear the burqa only because they are coerced. This argument, Nussbaum says, “is typically made by people who have no idea what the circumstances of this or that individual woman are . . . Do the arguers really believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly Muslim problem?  If they do, they are dead wrong. There is no evidence that Muslim families have a disproportionate amount of such violence. Indeed, given the strong association between domestic violence and the abuse of alcohol, it seems at least plausible that observant Muslim families will turn out to have less of it.”

The final argument, Nussbaum says, is that the burqa is unhealthy because it is hot and uncomfortable. “Clothing that covers the body can be comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on the fabric,” Nussbaum says. “But more pointedly, would the arguer really seek to ban all uncomfortable and possibly unhealthy female clothing? Wouldn’t we have to begin with high heels, delicious as they are? But no, high heels are associated with majority norms, so they draw no ire.”

Nussbaum concludes that all of these arguments against the burqa are discriminatory. “We don’t even need to reach the delicate issue of religiously grounded accommodation to see that they are utterly unacceptable in a society committed to equal liberty. Equal respect for conscience requires us to reject them.”

Burqa and misogyny

Not everyone agrees with Nussbaum. Feisal Mohamed, an English professor at the University of Illinois, responded to Nussbaum in the New York Times with an article of his own. Mohamed says that the burqa controversy revolves around a central question, Mohamed says: “Does this cultural practice performed in the name of religion inherently violate the principle of equality that democracies are obliged to defend? The only answer to that question offered by liberty of conscience is that we have no right to ask in the first place. This is in essence Nussbaum’s position, even though the kind of floor-to-ceiling drapery that we are considering is not at all essential to Muslim worship. The burqa is not religious headwear; it is a physical barrier to engagement in public life adopted in a deep spirit of misogyny.”

Mohamed argues that in contemporary society we should look beyond the traditional disputes between religious liberty and political authority. We should, he says, begin to understand the concepts of “justice and equality to be absolutely good with little regard for whether we come to value the good by a religious or secular path.” He believes that “bigots of all varieties” can and do plead for protection on the grounds of religious liberty to justify their practices. He also believes that the burqa “might legitimately be outlawed as an instrument of gender apartheid” but he agrees that such a law might create more divisiveness than it cures.

No coercion

The question of the face veil is both real and symbolic but I believe it is more the latter – women who wear the veil appear to be different in appearance and mentality, and they are Muslim. The face veil to many people represents something that they do not understand, that they fear, or at least do not like. It appears that most people in Europe are prepared to lend support to any legislator who proposes banning the veil, and at least some Canadian politicians are sure to assume the cause. But perhaps our own history provides a gentler and a wiser model. Most of the religious sisters who were my primary school teachers exchanged their long habits for modest street clothes following the church’s Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. I was pleased by that change but the choice was theirs and made without coercion, which is as it should be.

One of Darwish’s books is called Cruel and Unusual Punishment:The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Her American publisher describes it as “a wake up call to the Western world.” The book blurb continues as follows: “Nonie Darwish presents an insider’s look at sharia and examines how radical Muslim laws are destroying the Western world from within . . . Heed this warning: sharia law is attempting to infiltrate Western culture and destroy democracy.” The viral message I received contained much the same admonition.

Darwish critique

I am not a fan of sharia law and believe, for example, that the Ontario government was wise to refuse suggestions that it be used in that province. But what Darwish is saying – or at the least what is being attributed to her — is boilerplate hysteria and has no place in civilized discourse. Religious extremism is an ugly thing but it comes in all flavours — Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jewish and Hindu. The vast majority of religious adherents are not jihadists or Christian warriors but rather people who want to live peacefully with their neighbours.

Jim Holstun, an American professor, wrote a critique of Darwish’s work in 2008, after she had published a book called Now They Call Me Infidel. Holstun says that for Darwish there are no real distinctions between moderate or radical Muslims, and no significant differences within or between Arab and Muslim cultures. If that is what Darwish is saying, it would come as news to the approximately 60 people of good will – Muslm and Christian — with whom I attended a 12-week course at the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality in 2009 called Islam: A Deeper Look.

Muslims in Canada

The viral message that I received ends with the following invocation: “In twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in CANADA to elect the PRIME MINISTER!  I think everyone should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on!”

The ACLU, of course, is the American Civil Liberties Union, indicating that this message is American in its origin and focus with a bit of Canadian content added on at the end. Interestingly, the name attached to the message is that of a Canadian academic in British Columbia. I have attempted to contact her but have been unable to do so. I want to know if she is actually distributing this message or if someone is playing a nasty trick on her because a variety of right wing websites are circulating the message over her name.

Demographic winter

The comments about there being enough Muslims in Canada in twenty years to elect the prime minister play on the theme of demographic winter. It is an idea much in vogue with the American political and religious right and it turns a long-standing concern about world overpopulation on its head. The problem, according to the new logic, is that a falling birth rate will have what one speaker called “catastrophic” consequences. The narrative usually reads that Western (read white) populations are not having enough babies to replace themselves, and that we will one day (soon) be swamped by immigrants from other races who will come to dominate our societies.

American blogger Bill Berkowitz, a liberal, wrote about demographic winter recently on a blog called The Smirking Chimp. “For many conservatives,” he says, “demographic winter — or ‘birth dearth’ as it is sometimes called — is the ultimate culture war battle, rooted in the rise of feminism, legalized abortion, the acceptance of homosexuality, illegal immigration, and the growth of minority populations. All of this is supposedly the result of a multi-decade campaign by liberals to undermine ‘natural law’ and the ‘natural’ family.”

One right wing website asks this rhetorical question: “Why is global white population declining and not the other groups? Does this have anything to do with the legal recognition of same-sex couples world wide among predominantly white nations in modern history, besides general reluctance to have babies?”

A vast conspiracy

The campaign around demographic winter allows the right to roll all of its straw persons into one vast conspiracy. Muslims, Arabs, immigrants, not to mention Western liberals, feminists and supporters of same sex marriage are all plotting to undermine Western civilization. The alarmists have created an intellectual frame, what one writer calls a “mainstream media shorthand”, to explain disparate events: Muslim veil debates in France (and Quebec); controversies over the construction of mosques in Switzerland (or Alberta); a reduced birthrate in affluent Western countries and a higher one in poorer countries; the closing of empty downtown churches in Europe (and Canada); debates over same sex marriage, even contraception and reproductive choice. One might ask, as a matter of Canadian interest, how the Conservative government’s maternal health policy aimed at helping mothers in poor countries but refusing to fund legal abortion, fits into this frame.

Since 2001, movies, books articles and seminars too numerous to mention have played to the themes of demographic winter and often to an anti-Muslim sentiment. While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawler is one such book. Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West is another. For Canadian content, there is the novel by Patrick Grady called Royal Canadian Jihad. There is also a documentary called Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. A seminar held in Washington in June, and sponsored by the Family Research Council dealt with the same theme. The Council is an offshoot of the organization Focus on the Family, which is also present in Canada.

These groups and individuals are also hyperactive on the web. Do a search for the term demographic winter and you will find no end of alarmist sites touting the same dire warnings. On the other hand, there is very little web material that offers a critique of dystopian and chaotic world described by the alarmists. Where are the progressives?

Scary indeed

The introduction to the email message that I received was very direct: “This is scary and you must read it carefully . . .please take your time and understand what it is telling you . . . Let us not become victims. Let us fight and keep our country or we will not have life as we know it for ourselves, our children or our grand children.”

Scary, indeed, that people are wasting their time, and ours, spreading fear and hatred rather than understanding and tolerance.

I spent two days in Toronto on June 26-27 during the G20 summit of world political leaders. I was doing communications-related work for a peaceful rally and march organized by labour and citizens’ groups (including some churches) on Saturday. It was a day that was to turn nasty late in the afternoon when a small group of people began to commit acts of vandalism. I took the photo shown here on Queen Street while upwards of 30 thousand people were marching peacefully in the rain. In the left corner of the frame, a young girl walks carrying an umbrella and behind her a man holds the hand of his female companion. In the centre is a banner that says people should come before profits and that public services essential to citizens must be protected. There are also people carrying flags identifying their unions – the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Service Employees International Union and others.

The People First rally began in the pouring rain at Queen’s Park, Ontario’s parliament building. A group of dark-clad police officers were ranged in front of the entrance. They treated any demonstrators who came near to them in a friendly but non-committal manner. The event’s sponsoring organizations included the Canadian Labour Congress, the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Council of Canadians, Greenpeace and the Canadian Federation of Students. The march began after about 30 minutes of introductions and speeches. The route was to take about 90 minutes, although it was awhile before the crowd of thousands could file its way into the street.

The economic crisis

The G20 leaders were in Toronto to discuss how the world’s countries can emerge from the global economic crisis. The message, at least from labour groups, is that the crisis was triggered by the reckless behaviour and in some cases the corrupt practices of some of the world’s largest private financial institutions. The fallout from bank failures and corporate bankruptcies has created widespread unemployment, and the crisis will not end until the unemployed can find good jobs once again. For that to happen, governments must continue to provide economic stimulus in the short and medium term. They should not plan, as Canada’s Conservative government wants, to chop public services and safety nets that citizens need now more than ever. So there was a lot to discuss and debate.

As I flew into Toronto late at night on June 25, I saw the huge jet planes of each of the leaders parked on a floodlit airport runway. The summit occurred in a densely populated downtown area, its perimeter heavily fortified by a high fence. The corporate sector and its lobbyists have good access to politicians and bureaucrats but most other organizations, including unions, often have to make their case through popular actions including public events. In Canada, these demonstrations have a long history of being peaceful.

People First rally and march

I remained near the back end of the People First march as it left Queen’s Park and headed south toward Queen Street – a number of blocks to the north of the security perimeter established by police to protect the location of the summit. In fact, organizers of the march had worked out their route in cooperation with the police. At Queen Street, one of Toronto’s busiest, lined with shops and restaurants, the march turned west toward Spadina, where it turned north again and began to make its way back toward its Queen’s Park origin. The atmosphere along the route was relaxed and almost festive, although the rain made it soggy. Some shops and restaurants had closed for the day but many remained open. I stopped in briefly at a Tim Hortons to use the washroom and buy a cup of coffee. The manager told me they had been having a busy day.

Police had blocked off the streets to all vehicles and were present on every street corner to enforce that prohibition. They were also out in numbers at the intersection of any street running south of Queen toward the area where the G20 summit was occurring. At some intersections the first line of defence was a phalanx of officers standing beside their bicycles and wearing yellow rain slickers. Others backed them up, dark-suited, wearing helmets with face guards and carrying shields and truncheons. And behind them, in some cases, were other police on horseback.

I saw no incidents as I walked the entire route and took photos. Back at Queen’s Park, there was some music after the march and a few speeches, but it was raining again and most of the people who had returned soon dispersed. Those from unions who had arrived on buses got back onto them and headed home. I felt that my working day was done so I walked out of the area to look for a pasta restaurant and later took a cab back to my hotel in north Toronto. Once in my room, I turned on the television expecting to see news of what the G20 leaders were discussing. Instead, I saw images of an overturned police car in flames, of black-clad vandals breaking shop windows with hammers and lines of riot police beating batons against their plastic shields and shouting “back up.”

Street vandalism

News reports indicated that a small band of perhaps 60 to 100 self-styled Black Bloc individuals had used the large, peaceful demonstration for cover. At some point well along the route of the march, they left it and retraced their steps along Queen Street. They began to commit acts of vandalism and attempted to probe the lines of police protecting the perimeter of the G20 summit area. This confrontation was – much like tropical storms and other natural disasters – an event made for television. The images, often repeated, of black-clad individuals, almost exclusively males, confronting police and smashing windows dominated local television news on Saturday night. There were more skirmishes on Sunday morning and by the time I left the city in mid-afternoon more than 600 people had been arrested. That number has now risen to an estimated 900, almost double the number arrested during the October Crisis in 1970, and it represents a blatant overreaction by police.

There is an odd symbiosis between those who plan security, those who try to break it and those journalists who report on it. Prime Minister Harper, who has been justly criticized for the runaway $1.3 billion cost of the summit, used his concluding summit news conference to say that the cost of security was justified by the vandalism that occurred in Toronto.

I have no respect for the small groups of provocateurs who appear on cue wherever summits are held and use the cover provided by peaceful protest groups until they unleash their mindless vandalism. I have yet to hear any them offer an articulate and justified defence of their actions. It is also possible, however, that police themselves deliberately instigated some of the mayhem. During a protest at a North American leaders summit in Montebello, Quebec in 2007, union leaders exposed three Quebec provincial police officers who had disguised themselves as demonstrators and were attempting to provoke the crowd and instigate violence. Any investigation into events on the streets of Toronto must examine that possibility.

Naked display for force

I had felt a growing sense of unease, even revulsion, in the weeks leading up to the summit, fed by the incessant talk of security precautions, the police presence, and the fencing off and closing down of the heart of central Toronto. The military style preparations were a prescient reminder that Canada, too, has its own security apparatus that can be deployed in a manner reminiscent of China, Russia, the United States and dictatorships too numerous to mention. I feel even more uncomfortable now, following the naked display of police force in the streets of Toronto.

There are those who believe that all forms of public protest are illegitimate but they are wrong. Giving public voice to important concerns is a precious right and we would be serfs without that freedom. India would not have achieved independence or American blacks their civil rights without Martin Luther King and without Gandhi. Workers would not have won pensions, paid vacation and a regulated workweek without strikes and public engagement. There was legitimate and peaceful protest in Toronto around the G20 summit. There was also mindless vandalism. The two are not the same.