Ontario G20 officials missed the lessons of Vancouver's APEC fiasco

VANCOUVER - Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin’s dramatic report slamming the Toronto Police Service’s actions against protesters during last June’s G20 summit sent waves crashing through the province’s law enforcement and political establishment. But it seems to have created no more than a transient ripple through the rest of Canada.

That's a mistake, say civil rights advocates, because the issues raised by the what happened last summer should resonate with all Canadians concerned about preserving their liberties.

Police faced a spasm of vandalism as world leaders met inside a fenced-off section of downtown, but hundreds of innocent people - peaceful protesters and bystanders - were also arrested. Many were detained under a 1939 wartime law the Ontario government promised to revise or abolish.

Marin concluded police allowed the public to believe the regulation meant to protect "public works" gave officers much broader powers to detain and search people away from the conference venue.

"I don't think I’m stepping out on a limb in saying that everybody now recognizes that these things were pretty gross abuses," says lawyer Craig Jones, former president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Jones, now heads the B.C. Attorney General’s constitutional and administrative law group and is lead counsel of the government's polygamy law reference case.
   
But in 1997, still a law student at the University of British Columbia, Jones was arrested at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation leaders’ summit on the campus while holding up signs saying "freedom" and "democracy."

Demonstrators were protesting the presence of Suharto, president of Indonesia's then-authoritarian regime.

He was among dozens arrested when RCMP officers clashed with protesters in clouds of pepper spray. Some tried to take down the fence shielding APEC leaders meeting at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Others were sprayed with no warning as police, worried the leaders' exit route from the campus would be blocked, cleared peaceful protesters from the road.

The clashes triggered a public inquiry by the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP, chaired by retired judge Ted Hughes. His 2001 report cleared the federal government and the Mounties of yielding to a demand by Indonesian officials that Suharto be shielded from embarrassing protests.

But it criticized the RCMP's security planning and execution and found an official from then-prime minister Jean Chretien's office pushed police to keep protesters back to preserve a "retreat-like atmosphere" at the summit, which Hughes warned could violate the Charter of Rights.

The APEC '97 fiasco seems almost quaint when viewed from a post-9/11 perspective and set against the G20's $1-billion security effort. But Jones says they're joined by a common thread.

"They both reveal some of the missteps taken by authorities in response to the challenges of policing these events," he says. “They both seem to me to be abject failures in balancing civil liberties and security interests. APEC was small potatoes compared to G20, which was massive."

It happened again at the 2007 Summit of the Americas conference in Quebec City, which drew 15,000 anti-globalization protesters, spawning yet another post-mortem by the complaints commission. The template was in place for the G20 meeting, though everyone was shocked by the scale of the police response.

Political scientist Norm Ruff says he's detected an escalation of police tactics since APEC, which he worries might be designed to keep all but hard-core activists away from these events.

"There seems to be a strategy of intimidation by the police to discourage the general public from taking part in these demonstrations," the retired University of Victoria professor says.

The fact relatively few Canadians became outraged at police behaviour at the G20 suggests we may have become numbed to these incidents, viewing them as passing aberrations, Jones says.

"My concern is that although they’re episodic; the incidents are more troubling each time," he says. "That concerns me, that we’re not paying enough attention."

Hughes says he was told his report was widely circulated within the RCMP and other B.C. police agencies and most recommendations instituted.

The success of the RCMP-led security effort for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver suggests the Mounties here absorbed those lessons, while G20 planners ignored them, says UBC Prof. Michael Byers of the Liu Institute for Global Issues and Political Science.

Except for a quickly quelled vandalism rampage by the so-called Black Bloc, protesters were left pretty much alone to march within half a block of the Games’ opening ceremonies and set up a tent city downtown. There were only a handful of arrests.

"Part of it was letting the protesters go where they wanted to as long as they weren't a threat to life or property," says Byers, who advised Olympic security planners on civil liberties issues.

"The success of the police in peacefully managing protests at the Winter Olympics was something G20 organizers should have taken into account, and they quite clearly failed to do so."

Jones argues as much planning should go into the legal ramifications of events like the G20 as goes into security measures themselves. Left unchallenged, security agencies will always expand their presence, especially when the public is exhausted from warnings about terror and anarchy.

"The whole point of civil liberties is that it’s constant vigilance," Jones says. "Every time there is any security episode, we lose an increment, we get pushed back a step. We get more surveillance cameras, we get taller fences, we get a bigger security zone. At some point we have to push back as citizens."