The Toronto G20 Summit

The police do not act on behalf of the common man. Police forces were created to protect the wealthy and nothing much has changed.

The local bar owner who’s managed to deny EI benefits to the employees he wants to dismiss without cause simply by scheduling fewer and fewer shifts for them, until they have none. All of the business owners who can get away with paying less than a living wage because even that’s better for an employee than no wage. Have you ever been given a job with a sales quota, one which the owner will threaten to “cut off your head” in a completely serious manner if you don’t meet, but pays minimum wage and gives no commissions or bonuses of any sort?

When I did factory work here in 2005, new hires were being paid $12 an hour – minimum wage was $7.50 or so at the time. Now in 2010, minimum wage has jumped to $10.25, the Consumer Price index shows a 6.4% rise in the cost of goods since 2005, and new factory hires are being paid… $12 an hour, and now it’s done through temp agencies so the factories can save on benefits and lessen union influences. These people, who are finding their labour able to purchase less and less, if they can find an outlet for their labour at all, are the ones who are unrepresented in government. There is not a single poor person in any Parliament.

I have some post-secondary education, but no degree. That’s my fault. At the time I didn’t understand the level of education now required to perform even menial jobs. A generation ago, a high school education was enough. To do the same job now requires four years extra schooling – schooling which has been dumbed down, with students hand-held through, and when they leave they’re still unable to communicate any better than a four-year-old. It’s no wonder they won’t look at a resume without a degree; look at how badly the last guy did and he had one. But that’s a different rant.

No, there’s no ‘conspiracy to deny me a job.’ There just aren’t many jobs for anyone, and a lot of competition. I can’t even get my foot in the door for an interview over the guys who I outshine in every other way. Finishing a degree’s a very difficult option when you’re up to your ears in debt (groceries don’t buy themselves) and have to keep a roof over your head and a car on the road, and your first chosen path (liberal arts) isn’t particularly useful anyway.

I protest because I vote, and I push others to vote, and because even though I vote, my interests are not represented because few other people in my situation bother to vote.

Yours is a good story, a success story, but it’s not my story.

Still wrong. You should consult a lawyer rather than Google Answers. If you think you have a relevant clause in an appropriate act, I suggest that you cite it and paste it here, and then explain your interpretation.

Now that I see why you bothered to even post in this thread, fuck, your dumber than I thought. (And that’s saying something!) But I’ll explain it to you anyway.

Now pay attention: the threat to a bicycle officer alone on the border with multiple people throwing rocks at him as he is trying to arrest someone DOES NOT EQUATE to the threat to a cop in riot gear with a few hundred fellow officers right there with him. But if that threat should rise to the level of an officer fearing for his personal safety, then yes, shoot the uncivilized asshole. That’s what the gun is for.

I’m not very optimistic, but I hope that helps.
By the way, there are some questions waiting for your answers in the “Can we shoot back?” thread you started.

So in effect, you are protesting your having made a couple of bad career decisions. As one liberal arts major to another, I recognize your right to protest, but I think you would do better to complete some job training appropriate to your abilities.

The act.

You’ll note that two conditions are required for this offence – first, you must be on premises, without permission, when entry is prohibited, and second, you must not leave the premises immediately. If you abide by section (b), you have not committed trespass.

I’m not sure that Muffin is the best person for you to get in an argument about Canadian law with.

I’m just sayin’…

Your mistake is here. Read the act again.

Not exactly. I’m protesting that our government wastes so much in pointless endeavours like fortifying downtown Toronto when it should be doing more to help those who do not have skills, jobs, or much hope to improve in those regards. I’m also protesting, to a lesser extent, simply to show that I support freedom of peaceable assembly, a Canadian right (that’s Section 2 of the CCRF) which I strongly in support of, and which I worried would be repressed, and still feel was seriously violated yesterday.

Personally, I’m actually taking correspondence courses right now in an attempt to enter a field more suited to my abilities, a field with less of a reputation for churning out graduates without prospects. I’ll be done in 2016. If all goes well.

If Parliamentarians were not paid a decent wage, then only rich people would run for Parliament, so you should not complain about Parliamentarians not being poor.

You should also tell the whole story, not just part. No, we do not have any poor people who are parliamentarians in Ontario or Canada, but we do have parliamentarians who were poor and/or who came from poor families. Have a look at the personal backgrounds of our parliamentarians, and get back to us with a breakdown of how many came from rich families, and how many came from the working class. My MP was a radio announcer in a very small market, and the MP in the next riding over was a bush pilot who lived in co-op housing. These are not rich people. They are people who understand the difficulty in making ends meet and who worked their way up in life.

  1. Why would a bar owner want to deny employees a benefit that’s paid by the government?

  2. In what world are you living? Do you think the criminals actually researched the employment practices of the places they were looting and busting up?

I was going to reply to some of your other nonsense, such as your apparent surprise that wages are down (doyyyy, imagine that, wages down when the economy just tanked, what a stunning, stunning surprise! Businesses should pay people $50 an hour! That will solve all problems!) but why bother? Never before was a username more appropriate to a poster’s understanding of economics.

I do love the silliness about “hey, only rich people got their proprty damaged.” Um, really? Like who? Most of the damage will be paid by either insurance companies or the City of Toronto - entities who get their money, by necessity, from everyone, most of them hard working regular folks. The deductibles will be paid for bythe franchise owners, most of whom work lengthy hours for meagre wages; franchise ownership is a very difficult calling. So in fact, virtually ALL the damage will be paid for by the working class. Tax and insurance money I, a working single father pay, will now go to pay for the damage caused by the rioters. Had they acted like mature and responsible citizens, rather than as criminals, we wouldn’t be out that money.

If you want a society where people can find jobs and get by, here’s a hint from someone who actually does have an education: you can’t get those things with lawlessness. Peace, order, and security are as important as freedom and democracy in maintaining a country where industry and commerce can flourish, people can find work, and tax dollars can be paid for things that benefit the common good and help the less fortunate. The correlation between rule of law, peace and order and a country’s success is remarkably predictable. Crime is an absolute deadweight loss. If folks are standing up to honest-to-God, apartheid-era-South-Africa injustice where the government itself is the criminal, that’s one thing, but smashing up a restaurant some immigrant family is paying for with 75-hour work weeks and all their savings isn’t comparable to Rosa Parks.

Actually, you know the real difference between the Black Bloc and a real protestor? People who really have the courage of their convictions show their faces.

Or you could have gotten a trade. I know lots of trucking companies looking for drivers. There’s never enough truck drivers and it pays well. Lots of trades don’t require degrees. Get an AZ license and you’ll never lack for work again.

And where do menial jobs require degrees? I work, all the time, with people doing ordinary jobs. I meet hundreds and hundreds of them every year and work with them; it’s one of the cool parts of my job. These people do not have degrees, for the most part.

That said, life does sometimes suck and if you need a job now you need one now. How this defends rioting, I can’t imagine.

Five million in the greater area, sure. 20-minute drive? You must commute in an F-18.

WTF??? You say this here, when before you said this:

So the government is currently helping those who do not have skills - i.e. apprentice construction workers - to develop their skills to be more employable but that’s not good enough?

Are apprentice construction workers somehow less worthy of government assistance in developing job skills than liberal arts majors? Why exactly do you think that? 'Cus you DO realize that the people who lose their jobs in the construction industry during a recession are the apprentices, right?

Face it - you really don’t know what you’re talking about. You wanted to go and protest because you’ve made bad decisions in your own life and want to blame them on others, the government or the fat cats that own businesses.

People like you disgust me. Perhaps instead of trying to find some cheap thrills at the expense of others, you could spend that energy finding a job. Or going to school. Or focusing your ire at your lack of employability squarely where it belongs - in the mirror.

And who determines a living wage? If the minimum wage is $10.25, is that enough to live on? For someone not me, maybe. For me, no. That is why I’m not applying for minimum wage jobs.
Employment rates Canada: 8.1%. That means that 91.9% of Canadians are employed. Most at above minimum wage jobs.

Given? You mean ‘taken’, as in you took a job with the emphasis on ‘you’. If you’re boss treats you that way then quit. If enough people do so, then he has to start paying more and stop acting like an asshole.

That is because these jobs have gone overseas to a large extent where people make $10.25 a day! You don’t want to deny them a job, do you?

The vast majority of poor people are idiots. At least those in developed countries. Which is probably a major reason why they are poor. If they were capable of running anything effectively, they probably wouldn’t be poor. We have enough idiots in government, thank you.

Mine is a good story because I made it so. Other people worked as security guards and didn’t get to where I did because they didn’t care about the job. They saw it as a minimum wage job and that is how they acted. I was grateful for having a job and wanted to do my best. Does it always work out? Nope, but it makes it easier for others to choose you when it is time to promote someone.

I just spent 9 years mentoring Yemeni nationals to assume the roles of the expats in Yemen. The main thing I told them, repeatedly I might add, is to prepare themselves for the time when the expats leave. Some choose to do so, others did not. When the time came to promote people into those expat positions the ones who got their certifications and showed an interest got promoted. Those who didn’t complained a lot and whined about how long they had been with the company and that the company owed them. Geez, sound in any way familiar?

I missed the or, at the end of the sentence. You could have been a bit more forthcoming in pointing that out, thanks. Though it still doesn’t render the original point moot – that is, that the people rooting through trash bins is considered “trespass.”

‘Gardens’ likely fall under ‘land under cultivation’, though rock gardens probably don’t. And without signs, fences, or anything under cultivation, there’s no trespass. Undoubtedly trespass -did- occur, as I’m sure someone stepped foot on a piece of grass at some point in the night, and so I stand corrected.

(My experience with the Trespass Act is only regarding areas not under cultivation, not fenced, or not signed – as an agent of the occupier I was required to tell them to leave first.)

Man, I’m glad I’m not in Toronto this summer… I was afraid something like this wouyld happen. :frowning:

We need a better way.

On this we agree. I’d rather money was better spent, too. And I’d agree that re-education into employable industries is a good thing.

You are protesting to ensure the right to protest? Part of the reason the police are there is to ensure that the protests are peaceable. Ergo, they expect a protest and are allowing it to happen. They aren’t stopping you from protesting they are only trying to stop the thugs. No one is stopping anyone’s right to protest other than the thugs!

Sorry, you lost me - what does ‘land under cultivation’ have to do with anything? I don’t care if it’s my house, my porch, my garden, my cornfield, my manure pile or my pig pen, if you’re standing in it/on it without my permission, you’re trespassing.

If any single one of 2(1)(a)(i) OR 2(1)(a)(ii) OR 2(1)(b) takes place, then there is trespass. You have been reading the word OR as if it were the word AND.

You should also have a look at trespass in tort.

It must be nice to have that luxury.

Yes, I mis-spoke. Took literally the only job I got an interview for.

Did you mis-speak? I’m not sure what you’re saying. Yes, it’s cheaper to farm work out to a country where the workers will work for next to nothing. Thank god that there are some places left in the world where they don’t care about workers’ rights.

The other option is a disenfranchised portion of the population; one which is expanding rapidly. If there’s enough of them, and enough of them get angry about it, they’ll start trying to be heard in other ways.

The thing about poor people in this recession is that they’re not all lazy, poor workers like they are when the economy’s booming. Working temporary jobs has really hit that point home to me – about half of my always-changing coworkers, the chronically unemployed or underemployed, have no motivation to work hard, and don’t see the incentive in trying. The other half are hard workers, good people down on their luck, who have lost their jobs due to the fiscally unsound policies of the wealthy elite, who are stuck in an environment they are completely unused to but still trying to make the best of it. One coworker, an accountant for fifteen years, was paid $25 an hour pre-recession, but the same job now goes for $15 an hour (and it’s a hell of a commute for him, too). A sign of an overinflated salary? Perhaps. But it’s also a sign of an excessive supply of accountants fostered by slackening standards in post-secondary institutions (unless you believe the population is just getting smarter). Personally, I was an assistant in a marketing company. We managed the scheduling and sales of a group of motivational speakers. I can’t think of an industry that took a bigger hit in the latest recession – it seemed every news article everywhere was decrying the “wasteful spending” going towards the event planning industry.

I’m not sure what an expat is in this context. I know which of those employees I consciously endeavor to act as. But I also know my chances of getting a full time job as a result of showing my work ethic in a plant that only employs temporary workers, contract employees, and supervisors. I still work hard – if there’s only one full time job to come up in the next year, I will take it – but it’s discouraging.

Somewhat true. A secret regulation had been introduced requiring identification even outside of the security perimeter. (I find the existence of the security perimeter on what is ordinarily publicly-accessible land to be offensive on its own, anyway.) I truly fear living in a country where ‘papers, please’ is acceptable. Furthermore, there were examples (now confirmed by members of the media, see up-thread) of police attacking and arresting peaceable protesters, unprovoked. That’s not an ensured right to protest, not when it happens in a common area like a public park.

Regarding ‘land under cultivation’, it’s part of the wording of the Act.

Otherwise, notice is required – either by signage, oral or written warning, or some red dot system I don’t quite understand.