This is Crasstalk’s Toronto correspondent reporting. Occupy Toronto protesters have taken over St. James Park, and I decided to go investigate and see what was what.
After work today, I took myself down to the site of Occupy Toronto at St. James Park, which is next to St. James Cathedral at the intersection of Church St. and King St. The park itself is a pretty good size, probably 500 feet or so on each side. I approached it walking along King St. from the west, and I have to admit that it didn’t look very impressive at first. The first visible evidence of Occupy Toronto was a hippie drum circle and a bunch of dancing hippies.
There were probably thirty of them gathered at the edge of the park right across from the six media vans parked there. The visible police presence was also slight. I counted seven visible police officers, all of them on bikes and none of them wearing any kind of riot gear. Generally speaking, relations with the police seemed to be pretty good.
Once I was into the park itself, things started looking up. I was greeted by an impromptu map of the Occupy Toronto camp on a broken down cardboard box.
The map helpfully gives the locations of the food, logistics, sign-making, medical, legal, media and information tents. It also critically gives the locations of the fifteen or so porta-potties on site and rather less critically the hilariously named “Tree of Knowledge”.
I started wandering around the site seeing what there was to see, and it was quite busy in almost every area of the camp. As I walked by sign-making, I saw what amounts to a lending-library of protest signs, a nice recognition that many people don’t come prepped with a sign. There were six people sitting in a circle actively making signs, but they didn’t want their pictures taken.
Across from the lending library of signs was an actual library created by the occupiers, the Toronto Open Library. This contained a selection of literature and political reading, including various pamphlets. It’s a clever idea to make sure that people have something to do while not actively protesting.
Just up the path from the library was the medical tent. No pictures were allowed here, with a sign saying that it was to protect the privacy of both the medics and the patients, which makes sense. The medical tent was really a compound of five tents in a little circle, I suppose so if they had patients, the patients could have something approaching a private room. Right next to medical was the legal tent, though when I was there is was completely unoccupied. I know legal was around, since one of them piped up at General Assembly, but they weren’t there at the time.
On the other side of the path and on top of a little hill was the media tent. It was set up with free WiFi and had an attached generator, of which there were two on site. They were also issuing passes for independent media, and I will look into getting one when I go back in the future. They were having a media strategy meeting as I walked by, and seemed to be focused on social media, particularly twitter.
I walked across a wooded area with tents to the information tent. I have to confess to not seeing why they had a tent when there were information tables set up at all the entrances to the park and at the gazebo in the centre, but I suppose it gave them a place to put things away at night and if rain came along. Off to the north of there are the all-important porta-potties, which were provided by, I believe, the Ontario Federation of Labour.
Following that path, I was back to the gazebo, and there was someone talking into a really broken down sound system. The sound was so distorted that I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Near the gazebo is the “Tree of Knowledge”, which is were some meetings take place, and where the task board is set up. One of the tasks mentioned is the building of a solar generator which seems (a) a major undertaking and (b) a waste of time considering it is October and it will be cloudy for the next five months. There was also a space for volunteer signup, and the cooking rotation.
At this point we were getting close to the beginning of General Assembly and everyone began gathering at the gazebo. Before the proper meeting could get underway, some deluded individual decided to park himself in front of the assembled occupiers and start haranguing us about how we were all too dumb to see the impending genocide that was coming, and that we were “fucking ourselves” by locking the greatest minds of our generation away in mental hospitals. Methinks the gentleman had perhaps spent some time in one himself.
Finally, General Assembly got underway. It was complicated by the fact that it was starting to get dark. The facilitator started off by explaining the people’s mic system, and then the hand signs that would be used for consensus decision-making: spirit fingers to indicate approval, hands on head to indicate disapproval, arms crossed in an “x” for a block, making a triangle between your hands for a “point of interest” and hands cupped and pointed outward to add something new.
As might be expected, it took a very long time to accomplish anything, and ultimately only two meaningful decisions were taken. First, we would establish a Media Welcoming Committee whose job was essentially to round up willing interviewees and to try to protect anyone from being harassed by the media. It was also decided that they would make sure that someone with a recording device was recording all interviews to protect against selective editing. The second decision was to send back to committee a proposal that a system be set up to allow online participation in General Assembly decision-making. There were some major concerns about this issue, and so it got sent back for a thorough re-think. This whole process took about an hour and a half.
About 8:00 we started gathering for a march. We took about 15 minutes to gather so that the police could be informed of the route of our march and get ready to close the streets. We had gathered enough people to march (more than sixty) so that we were allowed to march in the street rather than on the sidewalk. We marched off down King St. to Yonge St. where we turned north and marched up to Dundas St. Yonge and Dundas is the sight of Yonge-Dundas Square which tries so hard, and fails so hard, to be Toronto’s version of Times Square. Once we got there, we occupied the intersection for about ten minutes. The police had closed off the other sides of the intersection before we got there, so we didn’t have to deal with any vehicles in the intersection.
The march was being led by a group of aboriginal activists, and when we got set up in the intersection, they performed an honour song. This resulted in painfully awkward white-people dancing. Even though by this point it was almost 9:00, there were enough people still there that we had a pretty good crowd looking on. After about ten minutes, we moved on and marched down Dundas St. to Church St., where we turned south to head back to the camp at St. James Park.
Once we had arrived back, it was almost 9:30, so I decided that was enough for the night and headed home.
All-in-all, a good experience. Sometimes aggravating dealing with the consensus decision-making process, but also impressive just how much organization there is after just four days of occupation. I was also pleasantly surprised by how chill the police were. The site was clean, I saw one guy cleaning up while I was there, and thanks to the porta-potties the sanitation appears to be good. They seem ready and able to stick this out for the long term.
