G20 police caught accidentally telling the truth in YouTube video: “This ain’t Canada right now”
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a policeman does something foolish/arbitrary/thuggish during the G20 weekend, gets caught on video by those darn kids and their YouTubes, and now an investigation is underway to determine whether the officer did anything wrong. In this case, the officer in question—York Region Sergeant Mark Charlebois—is being investigated for perhaps being a bit too on-the-nose with his response to protesters whose rights he was violating. When a protester refuses to allow Charlebois to go through his bag on civil liberties grounds, the officer replies, “There is no civil rights here in this area.”
According to the Toronto Star:
In the video, a woman’s voice from behind the camera points out that the protesters are not within 5 metres of the cordoned-off zone — the area in which Torontonians were led to believe, erroneously, that they could legally be searched by police officers at whim.
The male protester insists that, as a Canadian, he has the right to refuse the search. But the officer disagrees.
“This ain’t Canada right now,” he says
Ah. So it wasn’t just us who felt that way. Though perhaps Sergeant Charlebois meant it a different way.
The video was created and uploaded last July. We can understand why the provincial investigators are taking their time on this, though. It’s a pretty obscure medium, this YouTube thing, and the video wasn’t really noticed anywhere prominent—only in places like Maclean’s magazine.
At this rate, these investigations are going to go on until 2015 or so, right before we have to start all over again for the security nightmare that will be the Pan Am Games.
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