Hundreds of protesters demonstrated against Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canadian Investment Summit in Toronto on Monday night, as officers from the OPP and Toronto, York, Hamilton and Durham police looked on.
Demonstrators marched from Nathan Phillips Square toward the Art Gallery of Ontario, the site of a gala dinner.
The groups eventually splintered into three separate rallies — one on McCaul Street and two in Grange Park.
“As soon as (Carney) announced that he was going to bring some of the wealthiest people in the world, the billionaires, to downtown Toronto to do the summit, it very quickly became clear we had to resist it,” said Jasmine Peardon, a protester with the group Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed.
Demonstrators oppose what organizers argue will be the potential privatization of Canada’s public infrastructure from global investment, resulting in the transfer of public money into private hands.
The coalition of labour activists and Indigenous leaders gathered outside city hall Monday morning for the “Many Vs. The Money” press conference at Nathan Phillips Square ahead of the march.
“It’s an auction of Canadian public resources, institutions, infrastructure, airports and highways and water and power plants,” said Rachel Small from the World Beyond War. “Our money is covering the risk, and investors will be the ones making off with the profits.”
The conference seeks to “catalyze” $1 trillion in investment in Canada over the next five years, drawing CEOs, global pension funds and asset managers to facilitate investment in Canadian industry amid the backdrop of the Canada-U.S. trade war.
Small said their presence at a gala Monday evening was meant to show that global wealth can’t gather in Toronto unopposed.
The protest organizers warned of cost increases and service degradation that they say have been the hallmark of privatization efforts in the past, summoning the memory of the Walkerton water crisis.
A public inquiry into the tragedy in southwestern Ontario found that the privatization of water testing by the Mike Harris Conservative government contributed to the outbreak of E. coli that killed seven and infected thousands.
“Canada is getting very good at blackmailing the public. ‘If you don’t have these projects, we won’t have money to support more medicare, we won’t have money for higher education,’” said Wet’suwet’en Nation Hereditary Chief Na’Moks. “It’s false.”
Police warned participants that any criminal activity would be met with police action and arrest.
“The right to protest does not extend to violence, threats, property damage or other criminal activity,” a statement from police said.
“The police can try to scare us as much as we want, but we know that we have the right to be here,” Peardon said.
Around 9:30 p.m. on Monday, Toronto police said, they arrested two female participants for mischief, obstruction of justice and assault charges. The service said any further information on the arrests would be released at a later time.
Neither the Prime Minister’s Office nor Invest in Canada, a foreign direct investment agency that is helping organize the summit, responded to the Star’s request for comment.
