However, as time passes, I slowly realized that there is something terribly wrong with the city—no, I am not talking about those who used the black bloc tactic to destroy the city I love, I am talking about ordinary citizens, Toronto residents, who had their rights taken from them during the G20 weekend.
The streets were filled with police in their riot gears, randomly stopping people to look at their IDs and freely going through their bags and belongings; public streets were blocked off and part of the city were fenced in... it felt like some dystopia novel.
I am not really a political person and I usually keep my views/opinion to myself. However, by midway Saturday, I joined in on various peaceful rallies with fellow Torontonians and Canadians to voice our concerns about the state of the city during the G20 Summit. Contrary to what most of the world saw on TV, the protests/protesters were 99% peaceful and confrontation-free!
Sunday comes and it was a beautiful day. I was not aware of any official protest other than the bike rally. I decided to take a walk around the city. I saw a couple of “sort of protests”, but mostly just a gathering of curious on-lookers like myself. After a while, I started to walk on Queen West, planning to visit my favourite record store. As I came close to the intersection (Queen & Spadina) near where Criminal Records is located, I saw hundreds of people just standing around, walking by, and some sitting on the ground. People were just talking to each other, some singing... sort of a quite demonstration.
I walked around to take some pictures, as I made my way up north, I was greeted by lines of riot police telling me to move South… so I did. As a bunch of us made our way back to the intersection, we were asked by another line of riot police to move back South. By now, hundreds (maybe around 3/400) of us were trapped in a circle of riot police. They would not let us leave and started to arrest random people in the crowd. As this point, I put my camera away as ironically, I was concerned about my safety. To make things worst, it started to rain heavily, and for the next 4 hours, I was detained—with hundreds of ordinary people that were doing ordinary things like shopping, walking their dogs, and riding their bikes—by the police without informing us on the situation the entire time. Half of the people (including reporters) were arrested without an explanation, while the other half were released after standing in the cold hard rain for 4 hours. I went home, on one hand, glad to be free, but on the other hand, extremely confused and still confuse at what had happened and what I experienced.
