Verboten To Protest Actions Of Locally Elected Politicos....
A tale of two protests In Toronto, only some demonstrators are allowed to tie up traffic for hours on end
Two Thursday mornings ago -- during the same week Tamil protesters had paralysed traffic on a busy section of University Ave. for days on end -- 14 north Toronto citizens were intercepted by police for attempting to hand out flyers to stopped motorists.
The flyers informed drivers who use heavily-trafficked Mt. Pleasant to get to the downtown core about City Hall's impending plan to shut down the centre, reversible lane on Jarvis St.
Susan Prince of the Moore Park Residents Association saw three police cars pull up, two of which stopped traffic.
She said police told the troupe they were slowing traffic down right up to Eglinton Ave. and weren't permitted to "solicit out into the street."
Police also told them they'd have to stop or they'd be arrested, she added.
"It was certainly a Kafka-esque sense of irony that a bunch of middle-aged Canadians handing out flyers was considered a big enough problem for three police cars to pull up when traffic was being stopped on a major artery downtown," Prince told me yesterday.
"Once again, there seems to be a different set of rules for what kind of civic involvement is considered appropriate and not appropriate."
This is the great irony of Socialist Silly Hall, where "political correctness" applies only to those minorities the socialists decide it should.
I asked Police Chief Bill Blair yesterday how an innocuous information session at Mt. Pleasant Rd. and St. Clair Ave. could be treated in such a decided manner while Tamil protesters were left to block a major traffic artery containing four hospitals for four days.
He suggested it's a lot different (and easier) handling a dozen people wandering among cars on Mt. Pleasant than 10,000 people blocking traffic on University Ave.
"You just tell (a small group of) people 'please obey the law or you'll get a ticket,'" he said.
Asked to respond to the criticism that the police let the Tamil protest drag on for far too long on University Ave. -- fueling what happened on the Gardiner Expy. Sunday night -- Blair insisted the Tamils were "passive in their resistance" when they occupied University Ave. and that "did not justify" use of police force.
"The threat to public safety was minimal at that point," he said.
FAR MORE DANGEROUS
He said on Sunday night, it was a far more dangerous situation -- one which took hours of meetings with Tamil groups and his efforts to reach out to federal and provincial politicians -- before the protesters left peacefully.
"Our first priority is to public safety," he said.
I'll accept that the police walk a fine line, although I'd note the police budget -- some $919 million -- represents the largest contribution from our property taxes this year.
That alone should ensure that Toronto citizens are protected from civil disobedience.
I do think the chief is a decent man genuinely trying to do the right thing in the midst of utter chaos from Mayor David Miller and his minions. At least he actually turned up at the scene Sunday night, which is more than I can say for our feckless mayor, who could barely muster up a namby-pamby statement at 9:15 p.m. calling for "calm."
Yes, when the going gets tough, our King of Climate does get going -- this weekend it will be to Seoul, Korea, to hobnob with his climate change buddies.
I can't help but think if there was a real leader at City Hall, meaning one who had the cojones to do things that might prove unpopular to special interest groups, the Tamil protests would not have gotten so out of hand.
In other words, leadership is not about indicating yesterday, as the mayor did, that Sunday's protest was "unacceptable." It's not about insisting, as he also did, that it's "extremely inappropriate" for someone in his position to direct the police.
For heaven's sake, what does a strong mayor really do then? I guess his powers are limited to bullying his opponents into submission.
The point is, if Miller had spent as much time meeting with the Tamil groups -- and, yes, I'm told there are leaders to meet -- and trying to diffuse the situation,as he does on his "green" photo ops, I dare say they might have happily walked away content that some politicians were heeding their concerns.
That's what a real mayor does, not one who is simply consumed with his own star power on the world environmental stage.
SUE-ANN.LEVY@SUNMEDIA.CA
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