To Serve, Protect, and Beat Up The Mark's Copy Editors

Yes, that's our own Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy fleeing a baton-wielding G20 police officer on the front page of the Toronto Star.

This cop’s days as a member of the Toronto police force might be numbered. The Toronto Star has already posted a video of him hitting a protestor who appears to be pinned, immobile, beneath a pile of cops, and today he’s on the front page of the Star looking very much like he’s about to lay the smack down on The Mark’s very own unarmed copy editor, Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy. So yes, this is personal. (She says she’s fine now, by the way).

But according to the Star’s Rosie DiManno, action against any officers who used excessive force at the G20 is not likely to be swift. Chief Bill Blair can’t fire or even suspend any officer until the Special Investigative Unit concludes its investigation, and he says he can’t interfere with that probe without cause. “Yet surely there is cause,” writes DiManno. Specifically “the apparent abuse of power, [and] the indefensible bushwhacking of peaceful protesters … in a venue specifically designated for the purpose.” Oh, and the photos of officers hitting people that have shaken the city’s confidence in their police force.

The National Post’s Jonathan Kay, who once described the Star’s reporting as the journalistic equivalent of “fill[ing] everyone’s inbox with lawyer jokes and pictures of cute cats,” eats a little crow and admits the Star’s excellent G20 coverage has changed his original opinion of what happened at the summit. That original opinion included calling Toronto “an overprivileged wimp” for its reaction to police abuses, and in hindsight seems pretty knee-jerk and ill-considered. Kudos to Kay for admitting it, however.

A Globe and Mail editorial declares Ontario Ombudsman André Marin “got preposterously, massively, carried away when he said that the authorities’ overreaction during the G20 summit … was ‘the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.’” In light of events like the detention of Japanese Canadians during WWII this is a very good point, but seeing as it was made twice already by the Globe’s Adam Radwanski, Marin’s one sentence hardly seems worthy of a full editorial.