Those who accused the authorities of criminalizing dissent during Toronto’s ill-starred G20 summit got it only half right. As this week’s judicial farce demonstrates, the people in charge of public security during that raucous weekend went off the rails. They acted as if potential dissent were a crime.
How else to explain the numbers? During the summit, police arrested more than 1,100 people. Of those, some 800 were jailed — in some cases for more than 36 hours — yet never charged.
Of the 304 who were charged, the government now acknowledges that nine were fingered mistakenly. Another 58 more had their charges withdrawn or stayed Monday during a mass court appearance. The reason? There never was enough evidence to charge them in the first place.
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