CITIZENS' PANEL SUBMISSION
On the day of the G20 march, I was with the Ottawa Centre New Democratic
Party. However, as often happens in parades, I got backlogged, and found
myself with the Pink Power group, which seeks to raise awareness of the
poor
treatment of sexual and gender minorities in the G20 countries. As
I was moving along (I was in my electronic scooter) Laurier, with my boyfriend
beside me, I noticed that the Black Bloc (or some anarchist group) was
behind us. But rather than provide any kind of warning, the police swept
in, and grabbed one of the members. However, when they did this, the police
almost knocked over my scooter (the basket fell off‹I put it back on);
I would have fallen over, and found myself unable to get away quickly enough
(as I am physically disabled), had my boyfriend not caught the scooter,
and balanced it. Needless to say, it all happened so fast, and my boyfriend
didn¹t know that when you have an altercation with the police, you
have to sit down, or be seen as disobeying them. Some friends of mine in
the Pink Power group finally managed to get him to kneel down.
I was, naturally, quite shaken, but in the end, I was okay. Yet it truly upset me, as this was meant to be a peaceful march. Insofar as I could see, the Black Bloc members were not doing anything classified as illegal at the time the police swept in. What is rather shocking is that the police seemed to do little to isolate the crowd before they moved in.
This was a highly unfortunate circumstance, indeed.
Submitted by: Nathan Hauch