Rosie DiManno For Chief of Police!

Well maybe not. But the Toronto Star writer is doing a better job than Chief Bill Blair at exposing police misconduct at the G20.

Rosie DiManno at the Toronto Star has clamped onto the issue of police conduct at the G20 and refuses to let go, running a scathing op-ed on the issue for the second straight day. She demands that police Chief Bill Blair get to the bottom of the police brutality that was caught on video during the summit, but has so far resulted in no charges because supposedly the offending officers can’t be identified. “The Star has done much of the leg work for you, chief,” she writes, and indeed it has. DiManno presents pictures, videos, and even the names and badge numbers of officers who were present at the abuses. She’s really on the warpath here, and rightly so, but she’s far from hysterical. “Most of us who live in this city trust you still,” she writes, urging Blair to “[b]e the good cop.”

The G20 was a top to bottom fiasco, according to a Toronto Sun editorial. “Premier Dalton McGuinty, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Toronto Police all failed us,” says the Sun. McGuinty secretly authorized a law used to justify sweeping police power shortly before the summit, Blair has done nothing to discipline abusive police officers, and Harper “handcuffed Toronto” by foisting the summit on the city with only five months to prepare for it.

The Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanski writes that provincial Conservative leader Tim Hudak has tied himself into knots over the G20, trying to protect his pro-cop agenda while maintaining his anti-McGuinty agenda. Radwanski interprets Hudak’s speech today as asserting that "the province had committed a grave sin by handing the police ‘secret’ powers — but that police had done absolutely nothing wrong in blatantly misrepresenting those powers, and arresting innocent people.” Radwanski also blasts the “laughable” performance of Ontario Ombudsman André Marin yesterday, whose important report on the G20 “would be easier to take seriously” if he didn’t continually engage in hyperbole like saying the summit resulted in “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.” That's right. Residential schools? Japanese internment camps? Nothing compared to those two days June.