Results tagged “protests”

Enduring bouts of rain and hail, about a thousand students, workers, and community members marched through downtown Toronto yesterday as part of the Drop Fees for a Poverty Free Ontario campaign. At 4 p.m., they arrived at Queen’s Park to demand that the provincial government start "investing in the people, 'cause we are the solution," as the chant went.

What was advertised as a civic rally looked more like a mid-afternoon coffee break. On October 19, friends, colleagues, and supporters of Darcy Allan Sheppard—the cyclist who died after an altercation on August 31 with former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant—mingled on the lower steps of Old City Hall at 2:30 p.m. with their coffee mugs and lunch boxes, but did little else.

       

As the city celebrated Canada Day yesterday, a small group of Christie Pits neighbourhood residents—disgruntled by the City's policy of using parks as temporary dump sites during the city workers' strike—took their grievance to City Hall in a protest organized by Friends of Christie Pits. Residents' groups around the city have been confronting people coming to drop off their garbage at park sites.

                     

On Sunday, more than five thousand people gathered on the lawns of Queen's Park in front of the Ontario Legislature for an impassioned demonstration against the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the subsequent violence against supporters of the defeated opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi in Iran. With some protesters flying Iran's current flag while others waved the country's flag as it existed before the Islamic Revolution, emotions ran high in the crowd: some argued first with one another, and then—as police moved in to form a barrier at the front of the crowd as several people remonstrated forcefully with the speakers—with the police themselves.

As members of the Tamil community continue their demonstrations against the conflict in Sri Lanka, a high-flying counter-protest is underway, in the form of a small airplane circling around central Toronto with an anti–Tamil Tigers message in tow. Reader Mark Ostler first noticed the lofty banner, which reads "Protect Canada. Stop Tamil Tigers!", from his office window downtown. Shortly thereafter, Torontoist contributor Jonathan Goldsbie captured the above photo from Kensington Market (flipped here so that the message reads from left to right).

Like you didn't know this was coming: after a lengthy protest that shut down University Avenue for several days at the end of last month, and Sunday night's Gardiner takeover, Tamil protesters have once again forced the closure of University Avenue southbound from Dundas Street West to Queen Street West. According to Toronto Police, the stretch of street "will remain closed until further notice." It's almost as though some Tamils are passionate about not having their friends and relatives destroyed in a brutal civil war or something, to the point where they would deem it acceptable to add a few minutes to some drivers' commutes. Animals, the lot of them!

Last night, several thousand Tamil protesters took over the Gardiner Expressway for several hours, the latest and most remarkable protest in a series of attention-grabbing moves by the Tamil community that included shutting down University Avenue for several days two weeks ago. The protesters' methods have, without a doubt, drawn an enormous amount of vitriol, but also a large amount of attention for their cause. Do the ends justify the means? And are the ends even justified at all?

Not long before dusk on Sunday night, several thousand Tamil protesters flowed onto the Gardiner Expressway, shutting it down shortly thereafter, to protest the ongoing violence in Sri Lanka. The Gardiner would remain shut down until about midnight, when the protest migrated off the roads and on to Queen's Park.

After several days of sustained protest from Toronto's Tamil community that effectively shut University Avenue down to traffic, the Toronto Police Service reports that—as of 9:13 a.m.—the street is back open in both directions [PDF].

             

The protest by Toronto's Tamil community in front of the U.S. consulate on University Avenue continued last night and throughout today, with the street remaining closed between Dundas Street West and Queen Street West. And although heavy rain had thinned the crowd yesterday morning to only a hundred or so protesters, the Toronto Star reports that their numbers had swelled back up to a thousand by noon today.

                            

For the third straight day, throngs of demonstrators from Toronto's Tamil community—the world's largest outside Sri Lanka—have congregated on University Avenue between Queen Street and Dundas, holding court outside the U.S. consulate. As of nine o'clock this morning, the percussive rhythm of drums and rallying cries continued to resound along the artery, hemmed in on either side by watchful, horse-mounted members of the Toronto Police Service.

                                        

A river of red flags flowed through the downtown core yesterday as thousands of Tamils lined the streets to protest the latest Sri Lankan government offensive in the long-running conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, claiming that thousands of civilians had been killed, injured, or forcibly relocated. After forming a human chain along the streets for much of the afternoon, the well-organized demonstration gathered at Union Station where police closed part of Front Street.

In a startling and uncharacteristic move, CUPE Ontario has done something controversial. Even more unexpectedly, they've gone about it in controversial fashion.

2009 kicked off with promise in the air, a tonic sense of the future around which Western civilization warmed itself. Despite a snowballing economic catastrophe unseen since the 1930s, the world staggered onward, still high from the incredible euphoria of Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency. With the expiration of the Bush Era inevitable, we all held our breath, collectively waiting to exhale.

ART: Torontonian innovator Moses Znaimer is curating a new exhibit, "Im/AGE: From 'Bust' to 'Boom' to 'Zoom,'" launching today at the Propeller Centre For The Visual Arts. The exhibit is inspired by Znaimer's New Vision Of Aging for Canada. It aims to idealize his theory of the "zoomer," which is not actually slang for magic mushrooms, but rather a term describing a baby boomer with "zip,"...so, "zoomer." Sixteen artists will explore the question, "What does it mean to be one of the 14.5 million 45+ Canadians in Canada?" Among works from Jim Bourke, Joan Kaufman, and Joseph Muscat, Znaimer's exhibit will feature an installation from performance artist Faye Mullen entitled "here I lay," in which Mullen is naked the entire time, hell yeah appears nude, buried and planted in a shipping crate filled with peat moss, paying tribute to that decades-old theme of decay. If Moses Znaimer ever wanted to change his last name, it would be funny if he changed it to Zoomer. Propeller Centre For The Visual Arts (984 Queen Street West), 7–10 p.m., FREE.

The Israeli consulate at Bloor and Avenue was briefly taken over by a group of women, Jewish protesters, earlier today. The group, which includes writer and activist Judy Rebick and local filmmaker B. H. Yael, was protesting the recent invasion of Gaza, as well as the Canadian government's failure to condemn that military action. Their stated aim was to "send a clear statement that many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel′s violence and apartheid policies... [and join] with people of conscience all across the world who are demanding an end to Israeli aggression and justice for the Palestinian people." Police moved in on the group shortly after their arrival and are now arresting at least some of the protesters.

                                                    

Thousands of protesters gathered at Yonge-Dundas Square on Saturday to voice their opposition to the escalating violence in Gaza. Emotions were running high right from the beginning, with some protesters arguing over whether to chant in Arabic or in English. At one point a scuffle broke out between organizers and a protester who grabbed the microphone shouting, "Allahu Akbar"—Arabic for "God is great."

                                     

As the war in Afghanistan enters its eighth year, more Canadians oppose the war than at any time since the country entered the conflict in 2002 (according to polls). Last Saturday, several hundred protesters gathered in Queen's Park to send Stephen Harper a message: bring the troops home. The protest was part of a pan-Canadian day of action organized by The Canadian Peace Alliance. Protests took place in sixteen cities across the country.

PROTEST: Anti-Scientology group Anonymous is having another planned protest at the Church of Scientology today. If you haven't been to one before, hordes of people typically disguised by masks congregate outside the Scientology building and chant things like "Fuck Tom Cruise!" and encourage cars to honk their horns! Meanwhile, the staff at the Church of Scientology chill out in their foyer, have a potluck luncheon, and watch the festivities occur. We're not really sure which organization is more annoying. Church of Scientology (696 Yonge Street), 9:30 a.m., FREE.

Forgive us if we're breaking rules 1 and 2, but it didn't take us long to figure out that this fake Wii Battletoads website (site has changed, see Google cache for original) was a viral marketing campaign against the Church of Scientology's "Fair Game" policy.

180,000 people have applied to buy tickets for the eight games that the NFL's Buffalo Bills will be playing at the Rogers Centre between now and 2012. The tickets will range as high as $295 (pre-scalper), which is still better than having to go to Buffalo. Because it's such a long drive, we mean. Geez, stop being so sensitive, Buffalo.

Last we checked on a group who have now been dubbed the "Fight Fees 14," they were loudly chanting "Shame on you!" to police officers because they were slightly annoyed over increasing residence fees at New College.

In one of the more surreal moments from Streets are for People’s Tuesday visit to Queen’s Park, Rosario Marchese, the NDP MPP for Trinity-Spadina, donned Captain Planet–style superhero digs, made with a few go-get-’em words about public transit, and took flight into the Legislative Assembly’s inner chamber to save the known universe.

Following demonstrations on February 10 and March 15, Anonymous once again occupied the sidewalks across from 696 Yonge Street on Saturday. This time, however, the windowshades of Scientology’s Toronto outlet were drawn, its ground-level offices apparently vacant; with the exception of one lonely camera jockey, Hubbard’s loyal army of hyper-vigilant paparazzi were conspicuously absent.

Every year, U of T's student newspaper The Varsity publishes at least one joke issue, and every year in recent memory, it has managed to either seriously offend a few people, confuse a whole lot of people, or just not be funny.

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve.

Over a thousand demonstrators marched through downtown Toronto Sunday in an emotional protest to demand freedom for Tibet and to draw attention to recent crackdowns by Chinese forces that have reportedly resulted in the deaths of over 100 Tibetans. With international attention focused on China and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing organizers called for Canadian politicians to boycott the opening ceremonies.

Man stabs himself with katana. People may wonder how such a ridiculous accident came to occur, and our response is "he lived in Scarborough, what else is there to do?"

Yesterday afternoon, a group named AlwaysQuestion organized a "day of action" protesting a fee increase for New College residence students at the University of Toronto. The day was to end with a sit-in at Simcoe Hall intended to garner the group a meeting with U of T President David Naylor, to get "the proposed fee increase removed from the University Affairs Board meeting," and to get fifteen minutes at that meeting for a "presentation and discussion on broader issues of access to education and the impacts of high tuition." Instead, the day ended with two different narratives: one, from the protestors, of "police brutality"; and the other, from the university, of harassment and provocation on the part of the protestors.