OTTAWA—One of Toronto’s more respected journalists says he saw first hand the ugly face of police brutality at the June G20 summit in Toronto.

TVO’s Steve Paikin on Monday told a parliamentary committee how he watched a “chippy” journalist get punched and elbowed by police when the man objected to having his credential removed,

“If one defines police brutality as the thoroughly unnecessary, over-the-top implementation of violence to achieve something that otherwise could have been achieved without it then I saw that that night,” said Paikin, who is the anchor and senior editor of TVO’s The Agenda.

Earlier in the day the New Democrats said only a full public inquiry will get to the bottom of the overwhelming evidence of civil rights abuses at the G20 meeting in Toronto.

Paikin told the public safety committee probing the tactics surrounding the G8-G20 he was watching a “peaceful protest” on The Esplanade in downtown Toronto on the evening of June 26 when he witnessed the man reporting for England’s Guardian newspaper being pummeled by police.

“I did see the police assault a journalist,” he said, adding that police were rounding up anyone who looked like a journalist and in Paikin’s case he was given the choice of leaving or being thrown in jail.

Paikin said the man, later identified as freelance journalist Jesse Rosenfeld, did not have official G8-G20 credentials but did have Guardian credentials.

“They took his accreditation because they wanted to check out whether he was who he said he was. Two police officers held him, He was chippy, he didn’t swear but he was talking a lot. He was saying ‘Why are you holding me. There is no need to hold me. I am who I say I am’,” he said.

“One officer held one arm, The other officer held the other arm and a third officer came up to him and basically told him to shut up three times, punched him in the stomach. He doubled over. The same officer brought his elbow down on the small of his back and flattened him. It seemed to me that that was a massive overreaction to try and check to see whether somebody was who he said he was.”

Two University of British Columbia students Kirk Chavarie and Grayson Lepp told the committee of their treatment by police after attending a peaceful protest earlier in the day, including having to stand in urine and feces for hours on end in a temporary holding cell in Toronto’s east end only to have charges later withdrawn.

“Despite what some pundits would have you believe . . . I am neither a thug nor a hooligan,” said Lepp, who is to graduate from the UBC’s Okanagan campus.

NDP MP Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway) told a news conference on Parliament Hill earlier that not to hold a public inquiry is to accept that Canada is becoming a police state where the toe of an officer’s boot or punch in the gut is the rule of law.

Davies said not only has it been proven that police falsified evidence to justify widespread arrests — the largest in Canadian history — they also manufactured evidence, including so-called weapons seized from completely separate incidents.

“What we need is a full public inquiry . . . if not, one of the most shameful and largest mass violations of Canadians’ rights by police and the state in Canadian history will go totally unredressed,” he said

Chavarie and Lepp, both active in the student union at UBC, told reporters they travelled to Toronto to participate in their first rally, calling for accessible post-secondary education.

After they participated in the peaceful rally they were billeted at the University of Toronto only to be awoken the next day by a police raid. They would spend more than 40 hours in jail with almost no food and water and no legal representation.

“We woke up the next morning at gunpoint,” Chavarie told reporters.

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The two were among the many paraded in front of the media wearing handcuffs.

Lepp told reporters he found the entire experience “shocking,” especially hearing an officer berate a Francophone, also in custody, who had the “audacity” to ask for a glass of water.

“At which point the officer snapped. He said ‘shut the f--- up you f------ French piece of s---. You are lucky there are cameras here or otherwise I would send you home to Montreal in a f------ body bag.’ Then another officer grabbed him and removed him from the situation,” he said.