Tommy Taylor had never been to a protest. He had never spoken former Toronto Police chief Bill Blair’s name. In his own words, he was just a 30-year-old “straight white guy from Mississauga” who taught Shakespeare to high school students.

He was decidedly not an activist.

Then, on June 26, 2010, he wandered over to Queen’s Park to watch thousands marching down cop-lined streets during the G20 Summit. Hours later, he became one of hundreds rounded up and detained in a makeshift jail. He was crammed into a tiny cell for nearly 24 hours with 39 others and made to beg for water.

By the time he emerged from the temporary prisoner processing centre on Eastern Ave. — exhausted, angry, disillusioned — something in him had shifted, and the experience was about to alter the course of his life.

“The G20 woke me up,” says Taylor, 35. “It gave me a knock upside the head.”

It has been five years since the most notorious weekend in Toronto’s recent history, when cruisers burned, windows were smashed and police officers ripped off their name tags and swung their batons. Some violent protestors wreaked havoc, making the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators pay the price through mass arrest and indiscriminate detention.

For some of those affected by the G20 — many unwitting participants, arrested while walking home or swept up in the “kettling” at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. while going about their lives — it also marks a turning point in their world view. It is the anniversary of their activist awakening.

What form that activism has taken ranges from artistic to legal to political, but all were shaken out of complacency.

“They wanted to discourage activists,” Toronto’s Jay Wall said at a recent story-telling event in Toronto. “Instead, they turned me into one.”

Detained during the G20 while en route to a church event and held for 28 hours at the Eastern Ave. jail, Wall suffered serious anxiety after the summit. He sought counselling, then took action by suing police, settling out of court.

He also complained to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, launching a probe that ruled his arrest was “unlawful” and resulted in a Toronto police officer being found guilty of misconduct (Const. Vincent Wong has appealed the decision).

He and his lawyers then launched court action aimed at determining who ordered on-the-ground officers to arrest citizens for wearing bandanas — the sole reason Wall was swept up that day.

Once trusting of police and authority, Wall says has become more skeptical. He is no longer religious.

“The G20 was the catalyst of the slow, painful unravelling of my world view,” he said in a recent interview. “It didn’t happen overnight, but it meant that over the last few years, my political views have changed.”

For many others, the activism has been via the ongoing class-action lawsuit, which just last year was granted the legal go-ahead to proceed. In the decision, Justice Ian Nordheimer wrote that, if proven, the police actions “constitute an egregious breach of the individual liberty interests of ordinary citizens.”

Sherry Good, a lead plaintiff in the suit, was among the non-protesters who were swept up in the events of the G20. Heading home from brunch on Queen St. W. on the final day of the summit, Good was caught up in one of the most infamous events of the weekend: the so-called “kettling” of roughly 300 people for hours at Queen St. W. and Spadina Ave.

As torrential rain fell, surrounded by heavily armed police officers, Good was terrified. When she got home, the administrative assistant wrote down her experience and sent it to media, MPPs and lawyers.

“My immediate reaction was anger,” says Good, 56. “I am still very, very angry . . . It definitely reawakened something with me,” she said.

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Shervin Akhavi — also “kettled” at Queen and Spadina — is hoping to reclaim his perception that Canada is a free and democratic society, where people are innocent until proven guilty.

That was, after all, why Akhavi and his family moved to Canada from Iran. Upon his arrival, Akhavi was taken aback by how many Canadians took their freedoms for granted, so he hung the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on his wall to prompt discussion.

Being subjected to the “kettling” led to him becoming a complainant in the ongoing disciplinary tribunal of Toronto Police Supt. David (Mark) Fenton, who ordered officers to kettle citizens.

“It shook my confidence in the Canadian system initially, and as a result it empowered me to be actively involved in the process later,” Akhavi says.

Fenton is the sole G20 upper command officer to face discipline. The outcome of the hearing, Akhavi says, will determine whether he keeps the Charter on his wall.

Then there’s Taylor, the theatre instructor. He mobilized within hours after his detention, immediately penning a lengthy, detailed account of his arrest and time in jail, then posting it on Facebook.

The compulsion to share his experience prompted him to team up with a theatre company and turn his account into a play, You Should Have Stayed At Home. The one-man show, which includes a scene where audience members join Taylor onstage to beg for water, toured across Canada.

He also married fellow detainee Kate Bullock. At a protest following the summit, he publicly proposed to her. “Don’t look for a ring,” he said at the time, “I was going to get you one but I was stuck in prison.”

Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca

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