We Must Never Stay Home

I watched the Fifth Estate's, You Should Have Stayed Home, last night not expecting to see anything new,however, I was curious to see what treatment they gave to this story. Would they sugarcoat things or go for the jugular,in the end they went a little further than I thought they would, but still hewed towards the middle.

The personal stories were nice to see ,but not as compelling as those told on the Real News

What made the program compelling were the short clips of Bill Blair(I deliberately left out the word chief, because that is an honourific  he no longer deserves)being asked for his reactions to the video shown him by Gillian Findlay.

He showed himself once again to be dishonest or perhaps deliberately unaware, and by the end was left stammering for some type of justification for the events that weekend. This just served to remind us that he must be removed from office and an Inquiry needs to be called into the gross violation of our civil and human rights that tragic weekend in June.

The real disappointing aspect of the program was the fact that it totally ignored the involvement of the provincial and federal governments and the RCMP. It appears that Blair is to be the sacrificial lamb in all this, even though I suspect from some of his responses that he wasn't the one calling the shots, who was?, that's one of the questions that we need an Inquiry to answer.

Before I go ,I feel the need to point out something, the actions of the cops in the streets that weekend and the conditions at the detention centre on Eastern ave were only unusual in the sense that they were exposed to the public at large, committed against white middle class Canadians and of course by their sheer scale.   The treatment people received at the detention centre was no different than that received daily by those arrested in this city.

They are thrown into crowded pens, those unable to pay fines are tossed in with those charged with murder, they are lucky to receive one of those cheese sandwiches, have their medical needs ignored and much needed medication withheld. So while we must protest against the treatment of the protesters and bystanders that weekend, we must also step up and protest the similar  treatment of those accused of, but not convicted of crimes in this country, or does it only matter when it happens to us?