The Ontario Public Works Protection Act grants the executive branch “unlimited authority to the cabinet” to appoint any with the authority of a local police officer; deem any place in the province a ‘public work’; threaten whatever force is necessary to make any person—irrelevant of probable cause—identify themselves, grant consent to their person and property to a search, and prevent the person without cause from entering property deemed as a ‘public work’.

Paul Cavalluzzo, a Ontario-based constitutional lawyer discussed the Act with Paul Jay at The Real News Network (16:59):

A detention center was created out of a movie studio and to hold kidnapped demonstrators, the C.B.C. reported, and those demonstrating against the camp were violently forced to disperse by the police. Interesting is toward the end of the interview. People are being immediately released and this has been a redeeming quality of police apologists, but if there’s no evidence to hold a ‘violent criminal who has committed a crime justifying arrest’, what makes them a criminal justifying that arrest—and worse, what justifies this “processing” everyone has to go through. A great opportunity for governments enter new names and their corresponding numbers to databases for monitoring and warrantless surveillance (5:24):

Why are they protesting? Well, I wrote about that during the September Summit in Pittsburgh, Pa., but more during an October meeting between World Bank and International Monetary Fund oligarchs in Turkey. Journalist Naomi Klein, among others, sums it up best: “Here is where they stick us with the bill for that massive bank bailout” (3:15):

Black blocs, undercover provocateurs and the deification of industrialists are red herrings.

Jesse Freeston, a journalist at The Real News Network, was punched and subdued by the police in a scuffle that include the kidnapping of a deaf man for ‘ignoring police orders’. Mr. Freeston notes at the end that “when police attack journalists”, they are attacking the “public’s right to know what’s going on” (5:12):

There are lot of platitudes tossed around regarding the protests at last weekend’s G-20 Summit—polarizing rhetoric to dehumanize individuals as thugs and anti-capitalist, on both ends, using the same labels. The fact is that people expressed valid grievances against odious debt at the barrel of a gun and the only counter-argument by the authorities, defenders of the status quo, was brutal force and extreme intimidation.