Earlier today, Toronto police moved the participants of a days-long Tamil protest in front of the U.S. Consulate off of a major downtown street and onto the sidewalk. There were apparently about 100 protesters today, down from the roughly 4,000 that initially blocked off the high-traffic area when the protest began on Sunday and had continued to do so until this morning.
The protesters are advocating for international intervention in the civil war that has raged in Sri Lanka for the past 25 years. They support the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers, a militia that has fought for an independent Tamil state within Sri Lanka and has been branded a terrorist organization by more than 30 countries - including Canada - for using reprehensible tactics such as suicide bombing and the recruitment of child soldiers. The Sri Lankan government, over the course of the war, has carried out several massacres of its own, so this is one of those conflicts where it's not easy to pick a side, especially from this (uneducated) distance. Thus, I'll leave judgments on who's right - or who's less wrong - to the experts.
What I'm curious about is what this protest, and its eventual relocation to the sidewalk, implies about freedom of assembly and freedom of speech laws and their applications in Canada. The protests have been almost uniformly peaceful, although police did arrest 15 protesters last night. And certainly, the freedom to band together in a public space to speak up about an issue is one of Western society's most important differentiating ideals. To have squashed the protest or carried out mass arrests based not on criminal activity but on the inconvenience of blocking off busy streets would have appeared to be the actions of a police state.
But there is that issue of inconvenience. At what point does a municipal or provincial or federal government have the right and responsibility to step in and shut down the people who are shutting down a section of the city? The area of the protest is home to three major hospitals and a high density of economic activity, neither of which could have been allowed to be disrupted indefinitely.
Once the numbers went down, the police moved the protesters to a less disruptive location, and for the most part, the protesters complied. Problem solved, for now. But what if their numbers had remained in the thousands? At some point, the collective rights of the city's inhabitants would have collided with the rights of the protesters. Given that the police had already waited five days to relocate the protest, it's not clear what would have happened.
If anything, though, it was a testament to both the protesters and the rest of the city's population that this inconvenience didn't (or hasn't yet, I should say) result in more heated confrontation.
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