Family business: Blair planned on becoming a lawyer, but followed his dad into the TPS.
On June 26, 2010, Bill Blair was in the middle of the most complicated week of his career. The G20 summit had transformed the peaceful city that Blair had spent most of his life protecting into something closer to a police state. Protesters filled the streets. Steel fences sliced through the downtown core, guarded by black-masked riot police. Busloads of officers had arrived from across the country—cops who didn’t know Toronto’s streets and were technically not even accountable to Blair. Decisions about G20 security were being made by the Integrated Security Unit, a coalition of police and armed forces. The RCMP was responsible for controlling the area within the summit fence. The Toronto Police Service, assisted by officers from 21 provincial police detachments, was left with the rest of the city. The division of responsibilities was so unclear that as the summit began, even the head of the police board was confused about exactly where the ISU’s job ended and the TPS’s began. Blair was worried. International summits like the G20 rarely ended well. The chief had studied recent summits in preparation for the event, and what he found wasn’t encouraging. In Genoa in 2001, police had shot a protester to death. In 2009, rioters looted stores in Pittsburgh. Blair hoped to learn from history’s mistakes, but with tens of thousands of protesters meeting thousands of police officers, there were plenty of opportunities to make new ones.
Before the G20, Blair was as popular as a police chief can be. Crime was down, there had been no major scandals during his five years in power, and Torontonians seemed to agree that his emphasis on putting uniformed officers out on the streets was what was needed. More than that, Blair was likeable. He was intelligent and articulate, and he radiated a kind of unostentatious decency. In an Ipsos-Reid poll from 2009, his approval rating was 88 per cent. That same year, the Toronto Police Services Board unanimously agreed to renew Blair’s contract ahead of schedule, the first time in recent history that Toronto’s chief had been granted a second term. When the National Post ran a profile headlined “The Most Popular Man in Toronto,” it was hard to disagree.
While hundreds of people were held by police in the rain at Queen and Spadina, Blair was summoned to a congratulatory meeting with Barack Obama
Until that June weekend. On the Saturday of the G20 meeting, Blair watched TV news and closed-circuit feeds at police headquarters of the first images of protesters burning police cars and smashing windows. By now the events that ensued have become well-known to Torontonians, though familiarity has made them no less disturbing and surreal. Over the next two days, police arrested 1,118 people, the largest mass arrest in the history of Canada. Among those taken into custody was a TTC employee walking to work in full uniform, who was tackled by police and spent the next 32 hours in a makeshift prison. A 57-year-old employee of Revenue Canada sitting on the grass at Queen’s Park with his daughter was pushed to the ground, his artificial leg torn from his body, before he was dragged to a paddy wagon. Nearly a hundred police officers removed their name tags, rendering themselves anonymous for purposes that are unsettling to consider. Of all the videos that have emerged since the summit—clips of protesters being shot with tear gas, beaten and bloodied—perhaps the most telling was a simple sound bite. When a young man objected to a search, protesting that he was not required to give up his backpack in Canada, an officer looked him in the eye and said: “This ain’t Canada right now.”
Toronto Life: I’m pretty sure that “paddy wagon” is a racial slur…
August 3, 2011 at 10:08 am | by ebThe G20 was a giant police fiasco. Bill Blair should have apologized to the city for his failure to have the foresight to see that Toronto should not have hosted that thing. Period.
August 3, 2011 at 10:12 am | by ஜ✮msjag✮ஜBill Blair showed the world what a jack-booted scumbag he is, and his dissembling when confronted on the issues showed us what a liar he and the cops are.
It’s no mystery why he’s unpopular.
August 3, 2011 at 12:23 pm | by SteveYes. Paddy Wagon is a racial slur. Up there with ghetto blaster, jew’s harp and polak joke. Over it? Good.
The fallout from the G20 has never fallen where it ought: to the men in charge : Stephen Harper, Julian Fantino and their henchmen.
Blair is the fall guy. Watch for him to get a nice, plum job in the private sector, AND his pension.
August 3, 2011 at 12:31 pm | by McQuaidBill Blair is in the unenviable position of having to justify police brutality without anyone else in the G20 chain of command bothering to show their face. He’s been handed a hot potato that he can’t pass off to anybody in the government or the RCMP. Much as I dislike his responses, he’s the only one speaking to the public. Someone else chose to abuse the charter of rights and freedoms, and Bill Blair has to pick up the pieces and rebuild confidence in the Toronto Police. It’s hardly fair.
August 3, 2011 at 12:42 pm | by L ColemanOh, and I’d like to shove Derry’s face into a pile of manure. When you have the guns, the tasers and the beatsticks, it’s all well and fine to say that you are justified. Who’s going to argue with you? What an anti-human piece of trash.
August 3, 2011 at 12:45 pm | by SteveBlair might have salvaged some of his reputation if he had been honest, but he chose to lie to us. He lied (and joked) about the 5 metre law, he lied about the confiscated ‘weapons’, he lied about the video being tampered with and his defense of police behaviour on that day is simply beyond a lie. It is an insult.
August 3, 2011 at 1:52 pm | by A. McKinlayIt is simply untrue that ‘rioters looted stores in Pittsburgh’ — That never happened! Where are you getting that story?
This would be almost funny (or, trivial, anyhow) except that these falsehoods seemed to go from venue to venue, ‘justifying’ ever-more-severe crackdowns on peaceful public speech. Pittsburgh was justified by lies about London, Toronto by lies about Pittsburgh, and so on.
This demands a retraction.
August 3, 2011 at 5:23 pm | by John Pgh@McQuaid: why should anybody be “over” racial slurs? If you listed every single one of them in your comment, would you have then “covered them off” so you could safely use them in the future?
I never use ANY of those terms. You shouldn’t either. It’s that simple.
August 3, 2011 at 11:05 pm | by DisgustedGreat article. @Nicholas Hune-Brown, regarding the sentence stating “[t]here was no explanation for why police removed name tags or for the alleged beatings of Barton and Nobody”, did you ask Blair about this? Were these (and possibly other) topics that Blair wouldn’t discuss with you?
August 3, 2011 at 11:55 pm | by lewarcherIf people blame Blair they are playing right into the hands of the Black Bloc and other sociallly challanged people. The unions enabled the rioters by hiding them in their march and the idiots who went like spoiled children to insert themsevles into the trouble and make it impossible to tell who was who….well…you deserved what you got.
August 4, 2011 at 8:58 am | by TIM DEVLINSociety is dying…its such a self serving crowd useless parents have raised…Bill Blair I salute you and I guess so do the majority.
Tim Devlin, you’re such a riot! What a jokster you are.
August 4, 2011 at 9:26 am | by Marcy…because, of course, only someone half-brain dead would REALLY think something like that. And I know you’re a smart chap.
August 4, 2011 at 9:28 am | by MarcyOnce again the ‘Master of SWERVE and DEFLECT’ Chief Bill Blair along with his sidekick Mark Pugash…head of the TPS Association (who is always AGAST that anyone would ever suggest an officer did anything wrong)…has been able to charm…dazzle and colly-wag another journalist into reporting only surfacely on the real issues. I bet they laughed out loud when you left the room!
August 4, 2011 at 9:39 am | by Perkopolis9Kudos to Nicholas Hune-Brown for a fine article, but one that misses the dilemma that now faces us as a result of Bill Blair’s melt-down over the G20.
We celebrated Bill Blair’s appointment-finally a progressive mayor for a progressive city.
But now that he has failed in the test of whether he’s fit to be chief of a big city, what to do? Do we ask for his head (as we would in ordinary circumstance)and let Rob and Doug Ford appoint a new chief? Would that result in better policing for Toronto? I don’t think so.
No, we have to find a way to limp along with this well-meaning but fatally flawed chief,until things improve at City Hall.
Since that won’t be until more than three years from now, we as citizens of this city have to remain watchful and active, to try to keep the TPS in line, encouraging courageous reporters like those at The Star and Torontoist continue to hold the Chief’s and the TPS’s feet to the fire.
August 4, 2011 at 10:25 am | by moles