Simcoe's Weird & Complicated Relationship With Slavery — A Tweetstorm

August 1 was both Simcoe Day and Emancipation Day in the City of Toronto. One is meant to remember the British soldier who founded our city; the other marks the day slavery was abolished across the entire British Empire. It's an interesting overlap: Simcoe was responsible for abolishing slavery in Toronto; he passed the first law to end the practice ever passed anywhere in the Empire. But his relationship to slavery wasn't anywhere near as clear-cut and simple as that might make it sound. And so, to mark this year's Simcoe and Emancipation Days, I thought I'd do some tweeting.

You'll find the Twitter essay embedded below. And if you can't see it for any reason, you can read it all on Storify here.

Brexit, Eton College & The History of Toronto

The most famous boarding school in the world has just gotten a little bit more famous. Thanks to the shocking result of the Brexit referendum, Eton College has been popping up in the news. The posh boarding school is where two of the architects of the mess spent their teenage years. Prime Minster David Cameron and Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London, both graduated from Eton in the early 1980s.

So if you want to understand the breathtaking, aristocratic entitlement that led the United Kingdom into self-inflicted disaster, it helps to understand Eton. And in understanding Eton, you can also better understand the history of our own city — because it's not just where Boris and Dave went, it's where the man who founded Toronto went, too.

Eton sits on the banks of the Thames, not far outside London, just across the river from Windsor Castle. It was founded all the way back in the 1400s; King Henry VI started the school as a charity meant to provide free education to the poor.

But oh how things have changed since then. In recent centuries, Eton has made its reputation by catering to the children of the rich and powerful, helping to perpetuate the strict British class system. Yearly tuition can cost as much as the equivalent of $60,000 in Canadian currency. For a long time, the school's official uniform was literally a top hat and tails. (They finally ditched the top hat in the 1960s, but they've kept the tails.) The school is synonymous with the idea of British entitlement: that the children of the country's ruling class should naturally become its next generation of rulers.

Nineteen British Prime Ministers have been students at Eton. Both Prince Harry and Prince William went there, too. So did George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and Percy Shelley and John Maynard Keynes. And if you're counting fictional characters, then so did James Bond and Captain Hook and Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey. 

Eton College

And so, it's not surprising to find that two of today's most powerful Conservative politicians both went to Eton, too. The outgoing Prime Minster, David Cameron (inept champion of Remain), and the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson (Leave-supporting buffoon), both graduated from Eton in the early 1980s. They say you can trace the roots of their rivalry all the way back there — and with it, some of the very beginnings of the Brexit disaster.

As a student, Boris was older, more popular and more successful than Cameron — things that mattered even more than usual at such an aristocratic school. And since Johnson did better at Eton — and then again when both young men attended Oxford University — they say it drives him nuts that Cameron has risen to greater heights since then. Boris might be the former Mayor of London, a current Member of Parliament, and a newspaper columnist who got paid more than £250,000 last year (or "chicken feed" as he calls it) for writing one article every week — but that, apparently, isn't enough.

"Yes," Sonia Purnell writes in The Independent, "the fact that Cameron was two years below him at Eton – a terrifically hierarchical school – rankles deeply. As does the fact that it was Boris who shone there, not Cameron. Masters recall Johnson as a remarkable teenager. They do not recall Cameron at all."

According to countless media reports, Boris made it his mission to topple his old friend Dave and take his place as Prime Minster. If that meant joining the Leave campaign... well, that's what he was willing to do — whether or not he actually believed that leaving the European Union was a good idea for Britain.

Meanwhile, some suggest that Cameron's lifelong sense of entitlement — reinforced by his time at Eton — gave him a false sense of his own superiority. Slate describes him as "an establishment man through and through... the sort of person who gets away with too many things and comes to mistake his privilege for innate luck." When given the chance to gamble the future of his country in return for his own personal political gain, he did so. After all, he's been getting his way his entire life. Why would this time be any different? In order to appease the lunatic far-right fringe of his party, Cameron agreed to hold the Brexit referendum, confident that a Leave vote would never actually happen.

Boris and Dave

But when Boris — who is thought to have personally reassured Cameron that he would never support the Leave campaign — betrayed his old friend the Prime Minister, things suddenly became much more complicated. Johnson's support gave legitimacy to the Leave faction, even while it descended into absurd lies and bigoted violence. The racists behind Brexit never would have won, according to The Daily Beast, "without the fig leaf of Boris's charm."

The result: a stunning victory for the Leave campaign, an economy in disarray, bigotry and xenophobia on the rise, the murder of an MP, the end of Cameron's career, and scenes of Boris Johnson being booed the moment he pokes his head outside his front door. The Old Etonians have suddenly become two of the most hated men in the country they were raised to rule.

And in the end, Johnson's plan didn't even work: betrayed, in turn, by one of his own supporters (die-hard-Brexiter Michael Gove), Johnson has been forced out of the race for PM.

But the power of Eton College hasn't just been limited to British politics. Thanks to the Empire, the school's reach has historically extended far beyond England's own borders. In Toronto, you can trace Eton's influence all the way back to the founding of our modern city. More than two hundred years before Boris and Dave, there was John Graves Simcoe.

Simcoe went to Eton in the 1760s. And he too bought into its aristocratic vision for Britain. Years later, when he became the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he was determined to make that aristocratic heritage an important part of his new province.

Before he sailed for Canada, Simcoe got in touch with another Eton graduate: the famous scientist Sir Joseph Banks. In his letter, Simcoe asked for any advice Banks might be able to offer, and laid out his vision for his new Upper Canadian capital: the city that would eventually become Toronto.

A strict class system, he insisted, would play a vital role. Simcoe didn't trust the general public; they couldn't be allowed to have real power. As a solider, he'd seen the bloody results of the American Revolution with his own eyes — and more recently, he'd heard the terrifying reports coming out of Paris during the French Revolution. In fact, the Reign of Terror began the very same summer Simcoe founded Toronto. In his experience, when the people gained power, they had a nasty habit of beheading the elites. And so Simcoe was determined that his new city would be free from what he called "tyrannical democracy."

"There are inherent defects in the congressional form of Government," he wrote in his letter to Banks, "the absolute prohibition of any order of nobility is a glaring one. I hope to have a hereditary council with some mark of nobility."

John Graves Simcoe

He would never quite get his wish: Toronto never developed an officially aristocratic system like the one they had back home in England. But Simcoe did make sure that power rested in the hands of a few loyal Tory families. For the first few decades of our city's history, families like the slave-owning Jarvis clan kept all of the best government jobs and appointments for themselves and their friends. The habit would eventually earn Toronto's ruling class a derisive nickname: The Family Compact.

With the backing of their British overlords, the Family Compact dominated the Legislative Assembly, blocked all democratic reform, and cracked down on dissent. Anyone who disagreed with the Tory elite or demanded change quickly found themselves subject to threats and intimidation — sometimes even violence or imprisonment.

The Family Compact had no doubt they were meant to be the natural rulers of the province — a sense of entitlement that would look familiar to anyone who has been following Boris and Dave during the Brexit fiasco.

To help ensure that the power of the Family Compact would continue long into the future, they even founded a Torontonian version of Eton. It's still around today: Upper Canada College. The school's own website describes it as being "modeled after the great public schools of Britain [what we call private schools in Canada], most notably Eton College." UCC's job would much be the same as Eton's job on the other side of the Atlantic: training the sons of the rich and powerful to become the new generation of elites.

And it worked. As Wikipedia points out, "The school has produced six lieutenant governors, four premiers, seven chief justices, and four Mayors of Toronto." There have been plenty of other rich and powerful graduates, too, like Michael Ignatieff and Norm Kelly. In Toronto, the Old Boys of Upper Canada College have played something of a similar role to that of the Old Etonians in England.

But not everyone in Toronto was happy with the Family Compact. There was plenty of resentment against the ruling class in those early years. The opposition gained momentum over the city's first few decades, building into a reform movement led by the radical newspaper publisher and first Mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie. He was becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of democracy in Upper Canada. He made appeal after appeal to the British government, but his complaints fell on deaf ears — which was maybe not entirely surprising: nearly all of the British Prime Ministers during that period were Old Etonians themselves.

William Lyon Mackenzie

In the end, Mackenzie finally gave up on trying to find a peaceful solution; after a disappointing trip to London, he became convinced that revolution was the only way to break the Family Compact's grip on power. In 1837, he gathered an army north of Toronto and marched down toward the city with the aim of overthrowing the government.

Even the street the rebels marched down was a reminder of Eton's influence. Simcoe named the biggest road in Toronto after another one of his Old Etonian friends: Sir George Yonge.

In the end, of course, Mackenzie's rebellion failed. Democratic reform came peacefully a decade later under the name of Responsible Government. The leading champion of the cause was the moderate Robert Baldwin, who had been educated by the leader of the Family Compact. And Baldwin was able to convince the British of its value thanks in part to the support of Lord Durham, yet another Eton graduate. Change didn't come to Canada until the people advocating for it were members of the old boys club themselves.

More than a hundred and fifty years later, you can still see some echoes of that seminal divide in the Toronto politics of today. We saw it on stunning display recently, when Rob Ford was able to frame his mayoral campaign as a campaign against the "elites" by positioning himself as an outsider and purposefully distancing himself from the traditional, Upper Canada College-style Tories. Those who felt ignored by the establishment voted for Ford in droves. Casting a ballot for an apparent outsider seemed like a rare opportunity to give voice to their anger.

Last week, we saw similar emotions lead to similar results in the United Kingdom. The Leave side denounced the experts and vilified the establishment even though the leaders of the Leave campaign were establishment figures themselves. Boris Johnson has made a career out of playing the blond buffoon, trying to seem like a man of the people instead of a millionaire raised in privilege. The Brexiters, much like Ford, managed to convince vast numbers of people that the real cause of their problems was a dastardly combination of expert opinion and immigration. Not, say, the damaging policies those very same Conservative politicians have been hawking for decades: like tax cuts for the rich paid for by service cuts for everyone else. 

Both campaigns were illusions. Rob Ford was a millionaire born into a political family. His policies were the same old Conservative policies that have been hurting the working class for years. His successor, the aptly-named John Tory, is the most establishment-friendly politician you could possibly imagine — and in general his policies are pretty much in line with those Ford was pushing. Even a vote against the establishment led to establishment-friendly policies; they were just served with a side of crack cocaine.
 

And now, six thousand kilometers and an entire ocean away, angry Britons have voted in protest against their own elites, unleashing a wave of bigotry and decimating their nation's economy in the process. They have managed to drive their establishment-friendly leader out of power; Cameron, forced to resign in disgrace, will be remembered as one of the worst Prime Ministers in modern British history. But if all goes to plan, even with Johnson out of the race, there will be yet another establishment-friendly Tory leader moving into 10 Downing Street in just a few months time, ready to pick up right where the last one left off.  

The Old Etonian is dead. Long live the Old Etonian.

-----

Via Viv Lynch on Flickr

You can learn more about the connection between the histories of Toronto and England with A Torontonian Historical Map of London here. Read more about Simcoe's vision for Toronto here. And more about Mackenzie's failed mission to London here.

There's a whole dramatized documentary about Johnson and Cameron's early years, "When Boris Met Dave," which you can watch on Vimeo here.

The main image of "Toffs and Toughs" via Rare Historical Photos here.  Photo of Boris and Dave via The Sun. Photo of Eton College by me as part of The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour, which explored the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom.

One Last Victory for the Most Dangerous Woman in the World

The Most Dangerous Woman in the World was playing a quiet game of cards. It was a snowy Toronto evening in the winter of 1940, that first terrible winter of the Second World War. She was staying with friends at their home on Vaughan Road, waiting for a meeting to begin. That's when she slumped over in her chair. It was a stroke. One of the greatest orators of the twentieth century couldn't speak a word.

This wasn't the end most people would have expected for Emma Goldman. For decades now, she'd been the most notorious anarchist on earth. Her ideas made nations tremble: thoughts about freedom and free speech and free love; about feminism and marriage and birth control; about violence and pacifism and war. She'd been thrown out of the United States for those ideas, forced to flee Soviet Russia, driven out of Latvia, Sweden, Germany... Canada was one of the very few places where she was still relatively welcome. She spent decades in exile. And everywhere she went, she refused to be intimidated: giving fiery speeches, sparking riots, inspiring assassins, visiting war zones. Nothing could silence her. Not exile, not prison, not threats of violence. Nothing, that is, until that quiet game of cards.

The first stroke didn't kill her. She still had a few weeks left to live, weakened and afraid, half-paralyzed, robbed of the powerful voice that had made her famous. But even on her deathbed, she had one more fight to win. There was one last life to save.

~~~

Young Attilio Bortolotti

His name was Attilio Bortolotti. Some people knew him as Art Bartell. He was a leader of the Toronto anarchists.

Bortolotti was born in Italy in the very early 1900s — which meant that he was still just a boy when the First World War swept into his hometown. He saw terrible things: death and destruction raining down from the sky; dead bodies dumped in ditches; drunken soldiers killing their own men. But he also saw an act of kindness that would change his life.

One day, during an air raid, his young nephew was in danger of being crushed by falling debris. Bortolotti watched in amazement as a German officer — the enemy — threw himself over the young boy and saved his life. It was a shock. This wasn't the image of the Germans the Italian newspapers were painting: of the inhuman, savage "Hun."

"Young man," the German officer explained to the confused teenager, "I want you to listen to what I have to say to you. I am a professor; I was teaching at the University of Berlin when I was called to serve in the army. I don't feel that I have the right to kill you because you were born here; nor should you feel you can kill me because I was born in Berlin. I want you to remember three words: Freiheit über alles." Freedom above all.

"A revolution," Bortolotti later remembered, "began in my head."

Once the war was over, he left Italy for Canada. Here, he wouldn't be forced into compulsory military service and could lead a more peaceful life. He was just sixteen years old when he sailed across the Atlantic, checking in at Ellis Island on his way north to join his brother in Windsor.

He spent the next few years working for a blacksmith and on construction sites and in auto factories — both in Windsor and just across the river in Detroit. But the life he found there wasn't entirely peaceful: the early 1900s were times of turmoil in North America, too — especially for the working class. These were the days of bloody union battles. Of police officers and soldiers killing striking workers in the streets. Of robber barons building private armies to crack down on dissent.

In Windsor, the young Bortolotti was exposed to new ideas. He spent long hours reading in the public library, talked about politics with his fellow workers, went to meetings, marched in protests and clashed with police. The more he learned, the more he saw, the more he became attracted to one idea in particular.

By then, anarchism was already an old idea: that government is inherently bad; that people should be completely free; that society should have no hierarchy at all. But in the last few decades, that old idea had been growing in popularity. Anarchists had played leading roles in some of the world's most important events. In France, they helped to establish the Paris Commune. In Russia, they fought alongside the Bolsheviks as they overthrew the Tsar. In Canada and in the United States, they were on the front lines of the fight for labour rights: demanding reforms like an eight-hour workday.

But they were also growing ever-more notorious. While some anarchists didn't believe in violence at all, those who did were giving the philosophy a reputation for bomb-throwing and assassinations. All over the Western World, anarchists were answering the violence against workers by trying to kill those in power.

Anarchist theatre bombing, 1893

They'd been doing it for decades. In Italy, King Umberto was shot three times in the chest as he climbed into his carriage. In Switzerland, Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death with a file. In Spain, one Prime Minster was killed while relaxing at a spa and another while window-shopping at a bookstore in Madrid. In Kiev, the Russian Prime Minister was murdered during an opera. In Greece, King George was shot in the back while taking a walk. In the United States, President McKinley took two bullets to the stomach at point blank range while visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Bombs blew up weddings and carriages and crowds, all in the name of anarchy.

Governments responded with arrests and executions and even more violence. Sometimes, it didn't seem to matter who they were putting to death — guilty or not — just as long as they were anarchists.

One of the most infamous examples was the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. After a deadly armed robbery in Massachusetts, two Italian immigrants were arrested. They were both anarchists, they were both found guilty, and they were both sentenced to death. But they were also both innocent. The evidence in the case was so flimsy that it sparked international outrage, with major protests held in cities all over the world. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were both electrocuted anyway. It wasn't until the 1980s that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis finally cleared their names.

In Windsor, Attilio Bortolotti took up their cause. He organized meetings, raised money, and printed pamphlets. Even after the executions had been carried out, Bortolotti and his fellow anarchists continued to raise awareness of the case. Every year on the anniversary of the executions, you could find Bortolotti on the streets of Windsor and Detroit, handing out thousands of leaflets.

By now, his politics were starting to get him into trouble. His tireless opposition to fascism — which plenty of Canadians and Americans still supported back then, even as Mussolini marched on Rome and seized power in Italy — had gotten him blacklisted from jobs in the auto industry. His support for Sacco and Vanzetti earned him a meeting with Windsor's chief of police, who told him he was no longer welcome in the city. He was ordered to leave town. At first, Bortolotti just moved across the river, but it quickly became clear that things were getting dangerous. He was arrested in Detroit for handing out pamphlets; the police, he said, beat him unconscious. When he made bail, he slipped back across the border into Windsor, and then kept right on running.

That's how Attilio Bortolotti ended up in Toronto.

He got off the train at Union Station in the fall of 1929 — just a few weeks before the stock market crashed. At first, he didn't know anyone in the city. But when he took his leaflets to an Italian neighbourhood on the anniversary of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, he met a few Italian socialists and Communists who introduced him to a fellow anarchist.

Before long they'd created their own Torontonian anarchist group: Il Gruppo Libertario. They published their own newspaper, organized meetings and events. They became familiar faces at the Labour Lyceum on Spadina Avenue: today, it's a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown (on the corner of St. Andrew Street), but back then it was the political hub for textile workers in the heart of Toronto's Jewish community. The Italians began to meet the city's other anarchists: mostly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants. The community grew. Bortolotti had finally found his home.

It was only a matter of time before he met another anarchist who had been staying in Toronto: the most infamous anarchist in the world.

~~~

Emma Goldman, 1901 mugshot

Emma Goldman was born in Russia in the late 1800s, back in the days of the Tsars. She grew up in what one of her biographers called "low-grade Tolstoyan unhappiness." Her father beat her, sometimes with a whip, and when she turned twelve, he forced her to leave school and go work in a factory instead. "All a Jewish girl need know," he told her, "is how to make gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give her husband babies."

Still, even as a child she was strong-willed and defiant. She had no patience for injustice. Decades before Bortolotti was shaped by the horrors of the First World War, Goldman was shaped by the horrors of Tsarist Russia.

"I was born a rebel," she would later explain to the Toronto Daily Star, "but my first feeling of hatred for the present system came when I was six years old. At that time I saw a Russian peasant flogged and this sight of a human being degraded and tortured by his fiendish masters taught me that something was radically wrong somewhere. An indelible picture of the poor, suffering wretch has ever haunted my life."

When she turned sixteen, her father demanded that she get married, so Goldman left home instead. Just like Bortolotti did at that very same age many years later, she sailed across the Atlantic, checked in at Ellis Island, and then headed north. She settled in Rochester, on the American shore of Lake Ontario, where her sister lived.

There, she fell in love with America: with its people and its relative freedoms. But that didn't blind her to its flaws. Rochester was a city filled with sweatshops and slums. Workers toiled away over long hours in dangerous conditions for little pay. Goldman was still just a teenager, but she was bent over a sewing machine in a miserable factory for ten hours every day. It only got worse when her parents arrived from Russia. And when she did eventually get married, she discovered that her husband was impotent and depressed. She left him after only a few months.

Meanwhile, her political ideas were becoming ever-more radical. It was the Haymarket affair that finally turned her into an anarchist. The case had a lot in common with the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. After a deadly bombing during a labour march in Chicago, the police arrested eight anarchists. All of them were convicted. Four of them were hanged. A fifth committed suicide. But the trial was a farce: there was no real evidence, the jury was biased, and not even the prosecutor claimed that any of the suspects had actually thrown the bomb. People all over the world were appalled. Today, it's remembered as one of the darkest chapters in American labour history; it even served as the inspiration for International Workers Day, which we still celebrate on May Day every year.

Outraged, Goldman headed south to New York City to take up the cause. She arrived on a summer's day in 1889, just twenty years old, with nothing but five dollars and a sewing machine. It didn't take long for her to settle in, though. That very first afternoon, she headed straight for an anarchist café. That night, she went to see her first anarchist speech. Before long, she was giving her own speeches, earning a reputation as one of the most riveting lecturers in the country, passionately speaking about issues like labour rights, feminism, and political philosophy.

Today, many of her ideas seem pretty obvious — an eight-hour workday, legal birth control, gay rights — but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, even those ideas were deeply radical. She quickly attracted the attention not only of the press, but also the police. Once, she was arrested for giving a talk about methods of birth control. Another time, it was for inciting a riot. ("Ask for work," she told a crowd of the starving and unemployed, "If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.") She got so used to spending time in prison that she started to carry a book with her wherever she went, just in case she suddenly found herself in a jail cell without anything to read.

By the end of the 1800s, Goldman had become one of the biggest celebrities in the country. She was a front page staple. Red Emma, they called her. The Queen of Anarchism. The Most Dangerous Woman in the World.

And she could be dangerous. At least to some people. In those days, it felt like radical change could come at any moment. To many, the revolution didn't just seem possible, it seemed inevitable. The young Goldman was willing to do whatever she could to help. If violence was necessary, that was okay with her. Even murder.

Just a few years after she arrived in New York, Goldman planned an assassination of her own. She and her lover, Alexander Berkman — who she met at that anarchist café on her very first afternoon in the city — plotted to kill Henry Ford Frick, the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. He was responsible for a bloody crack-down on a strike at a steel mill in Pennsylvania, hiring hundreds of Pinkerton detectives — private mercenary soldiers — to attack the striking workers, killing nine of them. In retaliation, Berkman burst into Frick's office with a revolver, shot him twice and then stabbed him with a steel file. But the attack failed: Frick survived and Berkman spent the next fourteen years in prison.

Emma Goldman's deportation

Goldman, though, walked free. No one knew she'd been involved. And in time, her views on violence seemed to change. In later years, whenever asked, she would always distance herself from the use of force. "The only remedy for the people is anarchy... the form of revolution I want is bloodless... Anarchism does not believe in violence... Ideas are the greatest of bombs."

But even then she wasn't willing to condemn those who did resort to violence. When President McKinley was shot, the assassin claimed that he was inspired to do it by Goldman's lectures. "Her words set me on fire," he said. Goldman was arrested and questioned, but she refused to denounce the killer. "I have never been an advocate of violence," she told the papers, but "I have always felt that when an individual resorts to violence it is the fault of the conditions above him that bring him to it."

It was a theme she often repeated. For her, the real blame for any assassination always lay with systemic oppression. "As an anarchist, I am opposed to violence. But if people want to do away with assassins, they must first do away with the conditions which produce murderers."

In the end, though, it wasn't Goldman's violence that got her kicked out of the United States. It was her pacifism.

When the First World War broke out, Goldman firmly opposed it. It was, she argued, a war to protect the interests of the rich: not a cause worth dying — or killing — for. For the first three years of the war, her opinion was widely shared in the United States. President Woodrow Wilson even won re-election on a promise to stay out of the fight. But once the Americans did join the war, speaking out against it was no longer allowed. Opinions that had been widely shared suddenly became illegal.

Goldman, as always, refused to back down, giving speeches denouncing the draft. That gave the American authorities the opportunity they'd been waiting for: an excuse to get rid of her.

She was rounded up with a bunch of other anarchists and deported — all loaded onto a ship and sent to Russia. If they believed in revolution, the government told them, then the brand new Soviet state was the perfect place for them.

It wasn't. At first, Goldman was actually pretty happy to be going back to Russia. As someone who had personally witnessed the horrors of life under the Tsars, she had high hopes for the Russian Revolution. But when she saw it with her own eyes, she realized it had gone terribly wrong. A meeting with Lenin confirmed her fears. They had replaced one totalitarian system with another. She fled the country. Goldman would spent the rest of her life angrily denouncing the Communists.

After that, she never really found another permanent home. She spent the rest of her life living out of her suitcase, forced out of one country after another. Finally, she arranged a marriage to a Welsh miner so that she could get a British passport. That gave her the right to live in Canada, where she would spend much of the rest of her life.

She would never again be allowed to live in her beloved United States, so she settled for the next best thing: she would stay in Toronto, just across the lake from Rochester, as close as she could get to her family and to the country she loved.

~~~

The Heliconian Club, Yorkville

This was 1926. Toronto was still a deeply conservative city: a provincial town, deathly quiet on Sundays, staunchly British; not the kind of place you'd expect to find the world's most notorious anarchist. And not the kind of place the world's most notorious anarchist expected to find herself.

"I am so terribly cut off from intellectual contact," Goldman once wrote while she was staying in Toronto. "I grow so depressed and unhappy at times it seems I could not stand it another day." When the old anarchist criticized the lack of modern books in the library, the librarian gave her a blunt reply: "We do not buy books we consider immoral." Toronto was, Goldman complained, "deadly dull."

Still, it wasn't all bad. The authorities in Toronto were more tolerant of her ideas than those in the United States had been — even if they did still screen all her mail. And there was a small, dedicated community of anarchists, artists and other progressive thinkers who were thrilled to have her in the city. They put her up in their homes, helped her to organize meetings and lectures, donated money to the causes she championed.

Plus, every time the Toronto Daily Star wrote about her — and they wrote about her a lot — it was in positively glowing terms. They called her "the world's greatest feminine apostle of free speech." "Brilliant." "[A] speaker of notable excellence." "You were impressed not only by her knowledge but also by her wisdom. She was a feminine Socrates conducting a brilliant dialogue on high and grave questions of human destiny and human conduct..."

"No woman of her generation," the Star would remember after she died, "was more widely known or lived more fully than Emma Goldman. None clung more staunchly, through adversity, to her ideals..."

Goldman became a familiar name in the local papers and in lecture halls across the city. She spoke at the Labour Lyceum on Spadina, the Heliconian Club in Yorkville, the Hygea Hall on Elm Street, the Oddfellows Temple on College — always after a stiff drink of whisky to calm her nerves. Crowds of hundreds came to see her talk about feminism, free love, politics, literature... She thundered on about Sacco and Vanzetti, denounced Toronto schools for forcing all their boys to have military training, and railed against the dangers of Stalin with such passion that local Communists would attend her lectures just so they could shout her down. She warned of a coming war before Hitler had even taken power and gave speeches condemning him when many in Toronto still thought fascism was a perfectly acceptable idea.

She became a role model in a city starved for radical thought, inspiring those who were determined to make Toronto a more progressive place, and pressuring them to do better when she thought they were falling short. It was Emma Goldman who dared to speak about birth control back when it was still illegal, giving a lecture to a packed house at the Hygea Hall, earning a roar of applause when she declared contraception to be a right. (She was careful not to mention any specific methods — that would have been blatantly illegal and landed her in the clutches of the Toronto Police Morality Squad — but she did hand out cards directing women to doctors who could help.) And it was Emma Goldman who launched the movement to ban Toronto teachers from using physical violence as a method of disciplining their students.

She would never fully settle in Toronto; she kept living out of her suitcase, like she always did. She had three long stays in the city, but would spend long periods away from it: writing her autobiography in France, visiting the anarchists fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, going on speaking tours across Canada — she was even allowed to make one last trip to the United States.

But in the end, she always came back to Toronto. And that meant she was bound to run into Attilio Bortolotti eventually.

"I went to hear her," he said, "and was flabbergasted by the way she spoke, with her energy, with the beauty of her sentences." They were introduced after her speech, and eventually became close friends. Bortolotti volunteered as her unofficial chauffeur, happy to drive the old anarchist around the city as she gave lectures and attended meetings. Once, he even took her to Windsor, so she could gaze longingly across the river at the country she adored. ("She looked at Belle Isle and Detroit," he said, "as though through the eyes of a lover. It was then that I understood how much America meant to her.")

But this was 1939. All of Goldman's dire warnings were about to come true: Hitler invaded Poland that September; the Second World War was underway.

Toronto's Balmy Beach Swastika Club

That meant trouble for Toronto's anarchists. With tensions rising, Bortolotti found his fascist enemies even more dangerous than before. "I was threatened with being 'taken for a ride,'" he later remembered, "and for the only time in my life — I detest firearms and killing — I carried a pistol for a few months." 

Meanwhile, the authorities were cracking down too. As the paranoia of the war years set in, anyone with unusual ideas became a target for suspicion. Italians, even more than most; Mussolini didn't enter the war immediately, but he had long been one of Hitler's closest allies. It didn't matter that Bortolotti was one of the city's most ardent anti-fascists, or that he had been warning Canadians about the dangers of Hitler and Mussolini for years, or that Toronto's own Nazi supporters were trying to silence him. In fact, many have suggested that the police were working with the fascists, who gave them tips about the anarchists they both despised.

"We organized demonstrations and street meetings at which I... spoke, and were attacked by mounted police," Bortolotti remembered. "The authorities kept me under constant surveillance, and now they tried in earnest to deport me."

It was the war that finally gave them their chance. When the country was at peace, the police had to respect civil rights. But when war was declared, the War Measures Act came into effect. Suddenly, the authorities had what one historian has called "quasi-totalitarian powers." They were, according to another, "the most serious restrictions upon the civil liberties of Canadians since Confederation." Habeas corpus was suspended. So was the right to a trial. Political groups could be banned by the government. So could entire religions. Eventually, they would use the War Measures Act to round up Canadians of Japanese descent and imprison them in internment camps — one of the most horrifying abuses of power in the history of our country.

By the end of the first month of the war, the government had expanded the Act to give themselves the power to censor any literature they didn't like — and to arrest anyone found with this "dangerous" material. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines were shut down. Bookstores were raided, their owners arrested. Private homes were targeted too. Word began to spread among the Toronto anarchists: the police were raiding their homes one by one. Some rushed to burn their papers before it was too late.

They came for Bortolotti just a few days after the new rules came into effect. Before dawn one morning in early October, police on horseback surrounded his home on Gladstone Avenue (at the very top of the street, near Dupont). It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto's notoriously brutal anti-Communist unit: the Red Squad. They burst into the house, grabbing all five anarchists who were staying there. "Get up," they told Bortolotti, "and put on your Sunday best. You won't be going to work for quite a while." They searched the house, finding two guns with the triggers removed (the anarchists used them as props in plays) and seized all of Bortolotti's books, magazines and newspapers: a library of 1,500 volumes. The police would burn them all.

Bortolotti was arrested. He would spend months in the Don Jail while the government worked to deport him. The original charges were dropped, and most of the other anarchists were released. But Bortolotti wasn't a Canadian citizen and, having been threatened by Windsor's chief of police, he hadn't checked in at customs the last time he came across the border from Detroit. So the government was planning on sending him back to Italy anyway, where Mussolini's fascist government would be waiting for him. If he was lucky, he would be thrown into a fascist prison. Otherwise, he would simply be killed.

But not if Emma Goldman had anything to say about it. She was an old woman now, but she was still as defiant as ever. She leapt into action, asking her friends and allies to support Bortolotti's defence. She organized meetings, raised money, hired a lawyer.

It wasn't easy. For the first few months, it was hard to find anyone to support the cause. The newspapers refused to cover the case. And even liberal Canadians were reluctant to challenge the government during a time of war. 

"Unfortunately," Goldman complained, "there exists a conspiracy of silence among the daily journals... More sad is the complete absence of individual animation of civic sense, disposed to defend civil rights from the invasion of authority... no journal, no magazine socialist, liberal, unionist or other, in the US or Canada, said one word in defence of the arrested of Toronto."

Meanwhile, Bortolotti was falling ill, suffering in the cold, damp conditions of the Don Jail. He came down with bronchitis, lost twelve pounds, ran a fever of 103ºF, and finally had to be transferred into the prison's hospital ward. 

Goldman refused to give up, but the campaign was taking a toll. It was, she admitted, "the hardest thing I have done in many years... [I am] frightfully weary of the struggle, and tired, tired beyond words."

That's when she suffered her first stroke.

~~~

295 Vaughan Road

She was playing a quiet game of bridge with friends, passing the time on a snowy evening before yet another meeting about Bortolotti's case. "God damn it," she complained at the beginning of a new hand, "why did you lead with that?"

Then, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World slumped over sideways in her chair. At first, her friends thought she'd dropped a card and was bending over to pick it up. But she'd actually suffered a massive stroke.

Bortolotti was out on bail when he got the phone call. "I don’t know how I drove without causing accidents," he remembered, "because I was out of my mind. And I arrived on Vaughan Road there, and saw Emma, moaning—she couldn’t talk any more. Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter one word." She was half-paralyzed. There was fear in her eyes. Embarrassed that her bare knee was showing, she pulled her skirt down with one hand. Moments later, the ambulance arrived.

She spent the next six weeks at Toronto General Hospital, where they did what they could for her. She was in tears for much of that time. When she was finally well enough to go home, her speech still hadn't recovered; she struggled to say even a few words. Still, she kept working. She could understand conversations and read her letters, getting friends to write her replies.

Slowly but surely, her persistence had begun to pay off. People had started contributing to Bortolotti's defence. First, it was an Italian-American anarchist newspaper. Then, a Yiddish-language paper in New York. There was a spaghetti dinner to raise money in Chicago. A play performed in Brooklyn. Another benefit in Massachusetts. Goldman had her letters to the editor published in The Nation, The New Republic and The Canadian Forum. Eventually, some leading progressive Canadians — like the leader of the federal CCF party (the forerunner of the NDP) — were convinced to join the fight. More letters were written. There were meetings with MPs. The Star published an editorial asking the government to halt the deportation. The tide was finally turning.

Goldman lived long enough to hear the good news: Bortolotti was free to stay. They'd won. He would eventually get his Canadian citizenship, start his own successful business, and play a leading role in Toronto's anarchist community for decades to come. Thirty years later, the Globe and Mail would write about him fondly, calling him "the grand old man of Toronto anarchism."

A few months after Goldman's first stroke, she suffered a second. This time, she wouldn't recover at all. She died in the middle of May at that same house on Vaughan Road.

A service was held at the Labour Lyceum, the same hall where Goldman's resounding voice had once filled the air. For three hours people shared their stories and remembered her. The crowd was so big there wasn't enough room inside the hall; the mourners spilled out onto Spadina. A full funeral in Chicago followed, where she was laid to rest next to the martyrs of the Haymarket affair who had inspired her to become an anarchist all those years ago.

She had gone down fighting, working hard for a cause she believed in right to the very end. It's all she ever wanted.

Once, years earlier, the Star asked her if she had any regrets. "Whatever will happen will happen," she said. "I hope to die on deck, true to my ideals with my eyes towards the east — the rising star."

That's exactly what she did.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

Emma Goldman's lonnnng autobiography is called "Living My Life". You can borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy if from Amazon here. Vivian Gornick's biography of Goldman was a big help with this piece. You'll find it through the Toronto Public Library here or from Amazon here. And so was Kathy E. Ferguson's "Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets", especially when it came to wrapping my mind around Goldman's attitude toward violence, which you can find through the Toronto Public Library here and from Amazon here. I also checked out C. Brid Nicholson's "Emma Goldman: Still Dangerous" which you can likewise find here and here.

There's whole documentary about Emma Goldman's time in Toronto called "The Anarchist Guest', which you can borrow from the Toronto Public Library here. Kevin Plummer wrote about her for Torontoist here (which was especially great for details about her final days). Mike Filey did the same in his book, "Toronto Sketches 6", which you can find on Google Books here. And Kaitlin Wainwright wrote a little bit about Goldman and her time in Toronto for Heritage Toronto here. You can see what the front page of the Toronto Star Weekly looked like on the day they welcomed her to Toronto here.

The University of California at Berkeley is home to the Emma Goldman Papers, which you can find online here. PBS' "American Experience" dedicated an episode to Goldman, which you can find online with lots of other information about here, or watch on YouTube beginning with part one here. The Past Tense blog talks about a Goldman visit to Vancouver here. 

The Toronto Public Library has an amazing online archive of old articles from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. There are more articles about Emma Goldman than it's reasonable to list here, but if you search her name in the archival, you'll find lots and lots of pieces about her and her time in Toronto. You'll find that here.

Toronto's anarchists shared their memories of Goldman — and of the city's anarchist community in general — in the book "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America", which you'll find on Google Books here or you can read it at the Toronto Reference Library (which lists it online here). There's also a whole chapter about Attilio Bortolotti.

Attilio Bortolotti tells his story on the "Between Canada and the USA: a tale of immigrants and anarchists" page of the Kate Sharpley Library website here and in the book "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America", which you can find on Google Books here, through the Toronto Public Library here, and on Amazon here. His story is also featured is in the book "Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915-1940", which you can find on Google Books here, through the Toronto Public Library here, and on Amazon here. There's a "short multilingual bibliography" sharing more sources of information related to him here.

You can learn more about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti on Wikipedia here. The historian Reg Whitaker writes about the "Official Repression of Communism During WWII" in Canada, including a bit about the Bortolotti case, in a PDF here.

Emma Goldman's mugshot at the top of this post comes via the Women Who Kicks Ass Tumblr here. Her second mugshot, further down, was taken in Chicago in 1901. It's from Wikipedia here. The photo of Attilio Bortolotti come via estelnegre.org — which is, as far as I can guess, the website of a nationalist Catalonian libertarian group — here. The Petit Journal cover featured the anarchist bombing of the Liceo theatre in Spain (in Catalonia, actually) covers via the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia here.  Her deportation photo comes via the Jewish Women's Archive here. The Nazi images of the Balmy Beach Swastika Club are from the Toronto Telegram via Chris Bateman's article about them for blogTO here.

The photos of the Heliconian Club and 295 Vaughan Road are by me, Adam Bunch.

This post is related to dream 41 The Most Dangerous Woman in the World Emma Goldman, 1940

A Thought About Stephen Harper from 1849

The day Canada became a democracy, a mob of angry Tories burned the Parliament Buildings down. They were mad because the Governor General — Lord Elgin — had just signed a new bill into law. The Tories opposed the new law, but that wasn't the worst part: the worst part was that Elgin had plenty of his own reservations about it, but he still signed it anyway. He could have vetoed the bill, but he didn't. That was a huge, nation-changing decision: it signalled the end of the British veto over laws passed by the Canadian parliament. It was the beginning of Responsible Government. From now on, when it came to domestic politics, Canadians ruled themselves. Parliament held the ultimate power.

The Tories and their supporters freaked out. To them, democracy was a dangerous thing: the stuff of blood-soaked rebellions, revolutions and guillotines. They'd spent decades opposing it. But the outrage wasn't only about the Tories' fear of democracy. It was also about fear-mongering and racism.

The bill was called the Rebellion Losses Bill. It paid compensation to people in Québec (called Canada East back then) who had suffered property damage during the rebellions in 1837. The previous Tory government had already done the same thing for the anglophone region of Ontario (Canada West), so it shouldn't have been controversial — but it was: the conservatives hated it.

To many Tory supporters, francophones weren't real Canadians. They couldn't be: they were Catholic; they spoke French. Real Canadians were British: they were Protestant; they spoke English. Anyone else couldn't possibly be a loyal subject. They were all automatically rebels.

The liberal Reform party had recently been elected in a landslide. But their government was an alliance between English- and French-speaking Canadians led by Robert Baldwin (a Protestant anglophone from Toronto) and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine (a Catholic francophone from Montreal). Conservatives didn't trust that alliance.

The Tories saw an opportunity. If they could stoke enough fear among their supporters — if they could threaten enough violence and unrest — they might be able to keep the Governor General from ever signing the bill. And by doing that, they might keep Responsible Government from ever becoming a reality in Canada.

John Ralston Saul writes about the Tory strategy in his biography of Baldwin and LaFontaine. He argues that the Tory leader, Allan MacNab, realized that "his party would have to create a crisis of loyalty. Loyalty in populist rhetoric is always about patriotism... In this case, loyalty would be about the Crown, Britain, the Anglo-Saxon race... [The Tories] believed they could undermine democratic sympathies by simply setting anglophones and francophones at each other's throats."

And so, during the debate over the bill, the Tories used lies, misleading half-truths and racially-coded language to build fear in their supporters. The Tory leader called francophone Canadians "foreigners." His party claimed the Reformers were "dangerous, criminal and subversive of order... under the dominion of French masters... You laugh to see the Anglo-Saxons under your feet." One up-and-coming young Tory — John A. Macdonald — got so worked up that he challenged a Reformer to a duel by passing him note in parliament during the debate.

Elgin & two of the rocks thrown at his carriage

When Elgin finally did sign the bill, all that fear and hatred spilled over into violence. The conservative mobs began to gather before the ink was even dry; they were already waiting outside when the Governor General left the building, ready to pelt his carriage with rocks and rotten eggs. That evening, the Montreal Gazette — the city's big Tory newspaper — ran a special edition. "THE DISGRACE OF GREAT BRITAIN ACCOMPLISHED, CANADA SOLD AND GIVEN AWAY!" the editors raged. "Rebellion is the Law of the Land!" The paper openly called for violence: "ANGLO-SAXONS TO THE STRUGGLE NOW IS YOUR TIME."

That night, another torch-wielding mob of angry Tory supporters stormed the Parliament Buildings in old Montreal, burning them to the ground. They rioted in the streets and attacked the homes of leading Reformers. Guns were fired. "The city," according to Baldwin biographer Michael S. Cross, "was on the verge of civil war." And the unrest reached far beyond the borders of Montreal. As news of Elgin's decision spread, there were protests, riots, death threats, and Reformers being burnt in effigy all over the Province of Canada.

In Toronto, the Reform-friendly editors of the Globe published their own take on the events. "The Toryism of Canada," they wrote, "has ever founded its tactics on panics. To get up a good panic, and work it well has been the point of perfect in their political system... Let the panic be connected with a national crusade against the French Canadians, and the day might be won."

More than a hundred and fifty years later, those tactics still sound awfully familiar. Today, of course, the fear of francophones has been replaced by a fear of Muslims. Instead of rebellion, Stephen Harper talks about terrorism. Instead of Catholicism, it's Islamic extremists. Instead of the Anglo-Saxon race, it's the Anglosphere. Still, just like the Tories of 1849, today's Tory leader plays up the Canadian connection to the British Crown. He still glorifies the Loyalist exploits in the War of 1812. His ministers still talk about "demonstrating loyalty." And during the current election campaign, he's even hired an Australian political consultant famous for using racially-coded language to stoke fear among conservative supporters.

"Fear is not a policy. It is not an election platform," Stephen Lewis, the former NDP leader, recently declared during a campaign speech. "Using fear to get power suggests a deep and abiding cynicism."

It does. But it can also be an effective strategy. It has been for centuries. It distracts. The current federal election campaign has seen time spent talking about the niqab and "old stock Canadians" that could have been spent talking about other issues instead — like, for instance, the Harper government's efforts to undermine the supremacy of parliament and the foundations of Responsible Government.

"For Harper's Conservatives, playing the terror card is crucial," Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom argued back in May. "The more that terrorism can be made top-of-mind, the better the Conservatives will do."

Back in 1849, fear wasn't enough. The Rebellion Losses Bill was signed into law and Responsible Government was embraced by the vast majority. Canadians believed in democracy and diversity more than they believed in fear. On October 19, we'll find out if that's still true.

-----

You can borrow John Ralston Saul's biography of Baldwin and LaFontaine from the Toronto Public Library here. Or you can buy it here. You'll find Michael S. Cross' Baldwin biography to borrow here and buy here.

Steven Paikin wrote about Stephen Lewis' speech — calling it "the best speech of the federal election campaign so far" — here. And Thomas Walkom's column is here.

Main image: "L'incendie du Parlement à Montréal" ("The Burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal") by Joseph Légaré (via the Wikmedia Commons here).

Second image: Elgin's wife kept the rocks hurled at the carriage and carefully labelled them; they are now at the Canadian Museum History in Gatineau. Photo by me.

What Happened At Toronto's G20 Kettle, According To The RCMP

When the Mounties got to Queen & Spadina, the kettling had already started. About half an hour earlier, the Toronto Police Service — who were in charge of everything outside the G20 fence — had given the order to "box in" everyone at the intersection and arrest them all for "conspiracy to commit mischief." The RCMP unit, who were assisting them, arrived at about 6pm; protesters and passers-by would be kept there, in the street, in the rain, surrounded by police in riot gear, without any possible exit, without food or water or access to a washroom, for hours to come. The Mounties would help keep them there. They would kettle them despite the fact that RCMP policy forbid them from kettling anyone. And that they weren't trained to do it. And that some officers were openly questioning the orders.

That's all according to a report from the RCMP Public Complaints Commission — it was released in May of 2012, almost two years after the G20 summit turned downtown Toronto into an armed camp patrolled by nearly 20,000 police officers. The Commission, meant to "hold the RCMP accountable to the public," investigated a series of complaints against the Mounties, including what happened during the kettling at Queen & Spadina.

According to the report, things were already confusing by the time the RCMP arrived on the scene. They couldn't, for instance, find the on-site Commander — for two whole hours. The RCMP's own Commander — knowing that kettling was against RCMP policy, unable to find the on-site Commander — confirmed the order with the Toronto Police command centre and finally agreed to help with the kettle. He didn't talk to anyone higher up at the RCMP. "In the absence of somebody telling me what to do," the Commander explained to the Commission, "we just worked it out amongst ourselves."

His Mounties marched into the crowd, splitting the kettle in half. Over the next two hours, they would play their part alongside the Toronto Police Service and the OPP, surrounding 300 people with a wall of shields and riot gear. Not a single person who was kept in the kettle and was later interviewed by the Commission said they had heard any kind of warning to clear the area before they were surrounded. Many had been peaceful protesters; others were just curious onlookers. Some were local residents, out walking their dogs or getting ice cream. Scores of them would be arrested. YouTube footage showed how some of the arrests happened: a sudden break in the wall of riot gear, an officer rushing forward to grab someone from behind, roughly dragging them out of the kettle as they scream in terror, and then the row of riot police closing in again. 

According to the report, during the two hours the Mounties assisted with the kettle, they arrested five people. The RCMP Commander told the Commission they were arrested "because it was felt that they may pose a risk". What he didn't tell the Commission was that two of those five people turned out to be undercover police officers. He later explained that he didn't think that information was "significant".

He also didn't shed any light on the specific justifications for those particular arrests — whether the undercover police officers really were doing something that could "pose a risk," or whether they were arrested without just cause. The notes of the officers who did the arresting weren't any help: they hadn't even bothered to take down the names of the people they were arresting, never mind recording the fact that they were accidentally arresting fellow officers. According to the report, "It was only through an inadvertent comment that the Commission was made aware of the incident."

Toronto Police along Queen the day before the kettle

Finally, at about 8pm, the RCMP managed to track down the on-site Commander¹. By then, even the riot police were soaked from standing in the downpour. The Mounties asked to leave so they would have time to dry out their equipment before heading home to Vancouver in the morning. Their request was granted; they left. When the RCMP Commander asked why — with the G20 pretty much over — people were still being held in the kettle, he was told the Toronto Police were still planning on arresting them all.

According to news reports, it would be another two hours before Toronto's Police Chief, Bill Blair, ordered that anyone still under arrest at Queen & Spadina should be released. By the time they were let go, nearly five hours had passed since the kettling had started. And many of those who had been held would continue to suffer for years to come: from post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks, estranged from friends and family members who refused to believe their story, their faith in Canadian justice deeply shaken.

A year later, the Toronto Police would promise never to kettle anyone ever again.

But kettling wasn't the only issue investigated by the RCMP Complaints Commissioner. The Mounties, according his report, were not involved in much activity outside the fence — they weren't the ones attacking protesters at Queen's Park, arresting people without warrants at the University of Toronto, or running the detention centre on Eastern Avenue. But as the police force with "primary responsibility" for general security at all international conferences, the Mounties were heavily involved in the planning for the event. And the report raises plenty of questions about that planning².

It was rushed. And the Commission found that the various police forces involved didn't do enough to coordinate their operations. At the G8, for instance, which was held outside Toronto just before the G20, they had co-organized everything and put together a joint "Concept of Operations" document. Neither of those things was done for the G20 and it caused major problems — like the confusion around the RCMP's involvement in the kettling³. The RCMP Commander at Queen & Spadina wasn't clear on what he was supposed to do, disconnected from the Mounties' chain-of-command. They hadn't addressed the kettling question in the lead up to the event even though it was one of the highest profile issues heading into Toronto's G20 — there had been an inquiry into the use of a kettle by the London police during the G20 held in England the year before

And yet somehow, despite all of this, the report clears the RCMP of responsibility. The Complaints Commissioner concludes that "on balance" they did "a pretty good job." Their actions "were, in a general sense, reasonable and appropriate." The planning "was robust and thorough."  There was "attention paid to ensuring the rights of demonstrators." And the Complaints Commissioner's conclusions were echoed in headlines all over the country. The CBC: "report clears RCMP." CTV: "RCMP acted reasonably." The National Post: "Report exonerates RCMP."

Some of the report's recommendations make those conclusions sound particularly strange. The report says the RCMP should "make best efforts to establish, together with its partners, clear operational guidelines prior to an event where integrated policing will occur." It also reminds them that "there is at least some onus on the RCMP to ensure that any actions taken—even at the command of another police force—have a reasonable basis in law and some justification from a policing perspective." What the Commissioner doesn't explain is how a lack of "clear operational guidelines" and failure to ensure their actions had "a reasonable basis in law" can still be called "a pretty good job."

Spadina, south of Queen, on the day before

Of course, there's plenty of reason to believe that the Complaints Commissioner didn't know what he was talking about. Mostly because when he got the job, he told reporters that he didn't know what he was talking about.

The RCMP Complaints Commissioner used to be a man by the name of Paul Kennedy. He was a career civil servant with 35 years of relevant experience, including time working with CSIS (the Canadian intelligence agency). He was reappointed by Stephen Harper's Conservatives when they first came to power and initially everything seemed to be going well. His contract was renewed every year; the Conservatives praised his "commitment to achieving excellence in policing through enhanced accountability." They even promised to expand his powers.

But then, he said some things the Conservatives didn't like. He suggested the Mounties shouldn't be allowed to police themselves when they killed or injured someone. He investigated claims they might have illegally helped Harper win the 2006 election. And that they were barring liberals from Conservative events during the 2011 election. When four Mounties tasered a man to death at the Vancouver airport, Kennedy released a scathing report, laying out a long list of all the mistakes they had made. When they tasered a fifteen year-old girl while she was lying handcuffed on the floor being held down by three officers (and then tried to cover it up, and then investigated and cleared themselves for it), he released another scathing report. He complained when the Conservatives slashed the Complaints Commission budget. And he complained, over and over again, when the RCMP refused to cooperate with his investigations, wouldn't answer his questions, wouldn't allow him see documents, and took years to respond to his requests. More than anything, he complained that he didn't actually have any real power to hold the RCMP accountable at all.

So he was replaced. Harper's government let Kennedy go and in his place they appointed a man by the name of Ian McPhail. (He is still the Chair of the Commission today.) McPhail's background was in real estate and wills. He had no experience with criminal law or civilian oversight. As he explained to reporters when he was hired, "Look, you probably know more about the background there than I do."

But he did happen to be a long-time Conservative ally, with ties to the party going all the way back to the 1970s. When Mike Harris wanted to chip away at environmental regulations, he appointed Ian McPhail as Chair of the Environmental Review Tribunal. When he wanted to chip away at public broadcasting, he named Ian McPhail as the head of TVO. And when Harper wanted to curb criticism of the RCMP, he named Ian McPhail as the RCMP watchdog³. And he did it right around the same time that he announced the G20 would be coming to Toronto.

Still, even the most experienced and objective Complaints Commissioner would have trouble holding the RCMP to account. As McPhail's report points out, the RCMP Act "does not require the RCMP to cooperate with a Commission public interest investigation." It was the RCMP who got to "[set] out the conditions under which the Commission would be permitted to view RCMP documentation" and "crafted a protocol" for viewing them. Almost all of the information McPhail refers to in his report comes from the RCMP themselves: from interviews with officers (who, as we've seen, didn't always include significant information they claimed to be insignificant) and the notes they took (which the report repeatedly mentions as being inadequate and poorly prepared). One RCMP officer refused to talk to the Commission altogether⁴.

Police along Queen Street the day before

So in the end, the report's greatest contribution is to highlight all of the ways in which the report is woefully inadequate. The Commission could only interview Mounties who wanted to talk, could only see RCMP documents the RCMP wanted to share, and relied on notes that were never taken, or were incorrectly taken, or were poorly organized. It was put together by an inexperienced Complaints Commissioner with no relevant background in this kind of law, with deep political ties to a ruling party that has been accused of their own improper ties to the RCMP. (In fact, one of jobs of the report was to look for evidence the Conservatives had inappropriately interfered with summit security.⁵) The report couldn't address questions about the RCMP's undercover intelligence gathering because they were currently being sued over it. And maybe most importantly, the report could only address the RCMP's role — one part of a massive operation involving 20,000 police officers from many different police forces and questionable decisions made by three different levels of government.

There is a lot to investigate. In the first two years after the G20, there were at least ten separate reports launched into the police actions during the summit, all of them with their own specific concerns. (Ontario's police watchdog released his own report just a week before the RCMP report, slamming the police forces involved for using "excessive force," having "ignored basic rights citizens have under the charter," adopting inflammatory rhetoric⁶, and making "unlawful" arrests. That watchdog called what happened at Queen & Spadina "unreasonable and unnecessary.") But none of them had the power to investigate the entire story⁷. Many of the reports point to problems with the way the police forces worked together, but none of them was able to fully examine those overarching issues — or the fundamental decisions that may have caused them.

That's why groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association called for a full public inquiry into security at the G20. They've demanded a comprehensive investigation of exactly what happened, who made what decisions, and which decisions were the right ones and which were the wrong ones — all the way from the Prime Minster's Office down to the frontlines at Queen & Spadina. They want an explanation of how we got to a point where violent anarchists ran free through the streets, police cars burned, and more than 1,100 people were arrested⁸. Because a full investigation, from top to bottom, with real power, led by an experienced and impartial Commissioner, is the only way to truly learn what happened. And we're going to have to learn what happened if we want to make sure it never happens again.

Five years later, we're still waiting.

-----

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You can read the full RCMP Complaint Commission report here. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association's response is here.

To read the footnotes, hover your cursor over them.

A version of this post originally appeared on The Little Red Umbrella in 2012.

All photos by Adam Bunch.