On June 26 and 27, the political representatives of the world’s greatest thieves and murderers gathered in Toronto. They held their ‘G2o Summit’ in a billion dollar armed camp financed with public money stolen from vital social programs. They threw out some meaningless platitudes and drew up a plan around their real agenda – solving the crisis of their bankrupt system by imposing austerity and poverty on people throughout the world. With the Harper Government hosting the event and standing on the right wing edge of the discussions, plans were drawn up to half public deficits by 2013. They will not, however, take the money back from the banks and corporations they bailed out. Instead they will gut public services, destroy social infrastructure and launch a war on poor and working people.

...On June 26th the G20 met in Toronto with the government spending over $1 billion on the summit. This money funded the militarization of our city, security fees, promotional stunts involving a fake lake, lavish dinners and hotels for world leaders and their entourages. That weekend, in response to the G20 meeting, tens of thousands of people demonstrated on the streets of Toronto despite police violence and extreme intimidation. We know all too well that these attempts to criminalize and brutalize will continue in the daily violence that poor communities, people of colour, and First Nations communities face.

On June 25th – 27th, we demonstrated not just against the cost of hosting the G20 meetings in our city – but against the plans and decisions that were being made behind the security perimeter inside that armed camp. We protested because we know that the policies of the G20 affect poor people every day: decisions to fund security and prisons instead of schools and community centres, decisions to cut public services, childcare and welfare at the same time as giving huge tax breaks to corporations and banks. Decisions that serve the interests of wealth at our expense.