When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Beloved Queen East watering hole The Avro will pour its last pint on April 26, 2013.

Well, it certainly lived up to its name. Ask the residents of Riverdale and Leslieville, and they’ll say The Avro is considered to be an example of the ideal small business in the neighbourhood—locally owned, supportive of other community projects and events, inviting, friendly, wholly invested in its customers and neighbours, and peddling a quality product as well. But yesterday, the bar’s Facebook page posted the headline “The Avro Project Cancelled Again,” swiftly and abruptly ending its successful nearly-three-year run as a community leader, meeting place, and drinking hole before its time.

Also like its namesake, the decision is sparking some outrage.

“Like the historic Avro airplane, we must give way to foreign imposition before our time,” the announcement reads.”Thank you to the countless people, friends, neighbours and local business owners we’ve met, and for all the support you have given throughout our three remarkable years. We hope the spirit The Avro endeavoured to cultivate will live on in the east, and that friendships made around our bar will continue to grow beyond our closing.”

There’s no word yet on what is slated to replace The Avro’s space on Queen East, but it likely won’t keep the bar’s signature plaid curtains, costumed mannequins, and chalkboard bathroom walls. So Leslieville and Riverside residents will have one last flight on The Avro on Friday, April 26.

The Avro’s owners, Rachel Conduit and Bruce Dawson, opened the bar in 2010, and by the establishment’s first birthday they had already inspired a wellspring of east end culture. Comedy nights, video-game marathons, live music, letter-writing clubs, community gardens, toboggan and bike rides, and the East End Icon calendar were all initiatives that brought sleepy Riversiders out of their homes and into the neighbourhood. Simply being open until 2 a.m. seven nights a week was revolutionary along Queen East.

But for the past two months, Dawson and Conduit have been involved in a battle with their landlord over a rent hike and noise restrictions. With their three-year lease at its end, Conduit told Torontoist that negotiations ended with The Avro’s landlord asking for a 120 per cent increase and a rule prohibiting music after 11 p.m. (Conduit and Dawson thought a 30 per cent increase would be fair). “They just wanted us out,” Conduit said.

While part of The Avro’s demise seems personal, it comes at a time when Riverside is experiencing one the biggest increases in commercial property-tax assessment values in all of Toronto. The Riverside BIA fears that some local businesses won’t survive. The Avro’s longtime neighbours, LPK’s Culinary Groove and Loic Gourmet, also shut down recently.

“Bruce and I are pretty at peace with it, it has obviously been a couple months of struggling and fighting for it. So through all that, we’re at a good place now and understand this is the way it has to be,” said Conduit, who also owns the bicycle-themed bar Handlebar, which just happens to be located in Kensington Market, another neighbourhood at risk of losing its independent businesses due to rent increases.

And because Conduit and Dawson are now okay with saying goodbye to The Avro, they’re finding themselves being the ones offering a kind shoulder to their customers upset by the news.

“It’s like, ‘Aww, it’s okay!’ ‘Thank you! You’re very sweet’ ‘You’ll find another place!’” Conduit said.

“I was pretty surprised, and very disappointed,” said Morgan McIver about The Avro’s closure. “Everyone knows what Rachel and Bruce do for Riverside and Leslieville. It’s not just a bar making noise. These two are spearheading the changes around this community and making it more of a community.”

McIver has lived directly above the bar for the past two years with her sister, and it was one of the first stops they made after moving to the neighbourhood. “We ended up having the best night ever and met a bunch of people in the area. Even though we haven’t really hung out with those people, it’s still another ‘hello’ on the street.” McIver even has Conduit’s cell phone number in case they need to quiet down, though she has only needed to use it once.

Dana Harrison, who also lives around the corner from The Avro, ran her blog Well-Preserved as a hobby when Conduit convinced her to host a monthly meet-up event at the bar. The popularity of their Home Ec series snowballed into a trend that has since received attention in the United States and Britain.

“She’s the one who helped us push it ahead, and the next thing I know we’ve done it 12 times in a row,” Harrison said. “The conversation always kind of turned to that type of thing when we were sitting around the bar, so it became more of an instigator of other community projects. She was just really inspiring to a lot of other people to get them off their butts and thinking about the whole neighbourhood as a whole, that we’re all a part of one thing.”

Harrison will be moving her events over to Handlebar after their final instalment at The Avro next month. She says she would have preferred to keep it in the neighbourhood, but there isn’t another space suitable for it. Conduit also says that her community activism will continue in Riverside even without a physical space, as a member of the Riverside BIA.

CORRECTION: March 26, 2013, 6:00 PM This post originally said that Riverside is experiencing the highest increase in property tax rates of any neighborhood in Toronto. In fact, the area is experiencing one of the highest rates of commercial property-tax assessment growth. Assessment growth helps the City adjust a property’s taxes, but it’s not the same thing as a tax increase.

Chris Abraham. Photo courtesy of Red Eye Media.

When Crow’s Theatre Artistic Director Chris Abraham announced that the 30-year-old company would be opening a permanent venue at Dundas Street East and Carlaw Avenue in 2015, the Toronto theatre community breathed a collective sigh of relief and let loose a collective “ooh” of anticipation. People have complained for years about the physical state of Toronto’s independent theatres—an issue which came to a head last year when the Factory’s board of directors dismissed Ken Gass over a renovation dispute. Meanwhile, there’s been a significant amount of debate about the existence and accessibility of space where emerging artists can create and show work, coinciding with a recent mini-boom of new, DIY art spaces. What better time to hear about Crow’s new 200-seater, coming soon to the ground floor of a Leslieville condo tower?

We spoke with Abraham about the decision to open a new venue, and what he thinks it will mean for Toronto’s developing performing-arts ecology.

Torontoist: What made you and Managing Director Monica Esteves decide Crow’s Theatre needed a home?

Chris Abraham: When Monica first joined the company, I approached her about the notion that I wanted to radically change what I was doing at Crow’s. I felt like, with the energy that I had and the ambition and drive that I knew Monica had, I wanted to do something really different with the company. I wanted to take the resources that we have and think “wow, companies like ours still have those resources.” And then, thinking about larger, more systemic challenges that are facing theatre in general—the stagnation and decline of funding, the rumoured declining and aging audiences—we looked at what our opportunities were and where we stood to do something different to address those and other challenges.

The choice to open a venue in Leslieville, far off the beaten path so far as Toronto’s professional theatres are concerned, is bold. Why Dundas and Carlaw?

Both Monica and I live in the East End. I moved there ten years ago. And it was obvious to me immediately the psychic barrier that exists between the East End and the rest of the city. And the absence of cultural institutions. For people like myself who moved here with their families, there was an opportunity to be part of a kind of community that was—much like the West End in days gone by—in the process of identifying what kind of neighbourhood it wanted to become. And while I think we’re well into that at this point, we have not seen in the East End any kind of significant cultural infrastructure develop. There’s an audience here. And we looked at other strategies that had been tried and met with varying degrees of success in other parts of the city. We wanted to do something different. We wanted to try making a commitment to a specific part of the city, while not shutting the doors on the rest of the theatregoers in town. But, because we live here, we felt that we could really throw down the gauntlet and say “we wanna be here and launch a long-term conversation with you about what we do.”

And what about theatregoers used to the West End? Do you think people will be prepared to go to the other side of the Don to see a show?

I think that audiences that love theatre tend to go where there’s excellent theatre. There are potentially some obstacles there, but the East End is also a destination now. And that’s just going to get easier as the next ten years unfold.

You commented on the recent Praxis blog entry about Videofag and the somewhat contentious “crisis of space” many young artists are currently responding to. What do you think? Is there a crisis?

It’s important for emerging artists to practice regularly. And to do so on their own terms and to define the terms of their own expression. But my hope is that that doesn’t create ghettoes or circles of Hell, and that there’s mobility between those venues which have different audiences and different kinds of conversations that are going on. That’s one of the things that I miss about the city. I feel like the conversation about what it is that we do has become more homogenized and more singular, which wasn’t my experience coming up.

There’s been a rash of emerging artists opening up spaces like Videofag in recent months: storefront venues and rehearsal spaces. Is there a connection between this impulse and what Crow’s is doing?

Ours is certainly on a larger scale, but I think that the whole DIY thing is involved in what we’re doing. I mean, I would argue that the DIY impulse that’s at work is what Soulpepper did. Which is taking your destiny as an artist and as a culture-maker into your own hands and deciding that you’re going to create something that is more lasting than a production. And taking the challenging work of deciding for yourself what kind of an institution you want to have and what audience you want to cultivate around your venue. It’s not surprising to me that people are thinking more along these lines, because the funding landscape is changing. The audience landscape is changing…If you can’t find or can’t create access for yourself within the existing institutions, then I think you should make your own, and I think that’s really the way the world goes round.

If Crow’s is taking its destiny into its own hands, what is that destiny? What’s the plan for programming the new venue?

We’re gonna continue to do what we do. We will continue to curate, to commission, to develop and produce two to three new shows a year, some of which I will direct and develop. And it will be new Canadian work. We will also become presenters and curators, so we will showcase work of other artists who will we choose to present. Another important pillar in what we are going to do is create space and support for community-based work that will be part of the kind of outreach and education stuff that we do, but that will also be trying to create space for non-professionals to exercise their creative muscles onstage beside the work of professionals. And that’s very important to us. We won’t really have a theatre season, we won’t sell a season subscription, but we will have a full season of activities that will stretch from fall and winter into spring. And I would expect to see more varied programming other than theatre, including different kinds of performance, dance, comedy, and what we do in all three venues. We have our main theatre, a small studio space, and a cabaret. And we’ll expect all those places to be busy.

In a perfect world, what do you see in Crow’s future?

I’m hoping that we have one of the most exciting, engaged, and risk-taking audiences in the city. That artists are clamoring to come work at our theatre because they feel like there is an appetite for risk and challenge in the audience that comes to see us. I think that would be our greatest success. That our theatre is very well-attended, and attended by a whole mix of people who all have this special quality where you feel like when you perform there, that’s the place you wanna be. What else would be a measure of our success? That our best work—our work that feels like it has something to offer people outside of Toronto—is lasting, continues to tour, continues to do festivals. That we have an existence outside of the city, but are rooted in the neighbourhood that we’re in. And ten years from now, I’m hoping that our success will have inspired other like-minded artists to think about their capacities and to take a big jump.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

In The Avro's cockpit, co-owners Bruce Dawson and Rachel Conduit.

When east-enders Rachel Conduit and Bruce Dawson first started searching for locations to open a new bar, they had trouble. According to Conduit, landlords just didn’t trust that another watering hole wouldn’t “destroy the building and the neighbourhood.” Now, a year into their business, The Avro has done just the opposite—they’ve built it.

“When we first opened I was working a lot more behind the bar, and after about a month of that it was so draining, and exhausting, and uninspiring. I served people alcohol, and they had a great time, went home, and came in again. I’m sure all their memories blurred together, all my memories are blurring together. It’s the same day every day,” the bright-eyed blonde says at the dark wooden bar. “So I had this thought—I don’t want it to be your college buddy’s dorm room, I want it to be your inspiring artistic friend’s living room.”

For Dawson, a producer, and Conduit, an artist, that means a place where friends can come together for events like community bike rides, letter-writing parties, mixtape or preserve swaps, sketch comedy shows, DJ sets, movie screenings, or a concert from a local band. In only one year of operation, there have been about four dozen weekly activities and larger community events started by the bar. And along the way, The Avro and its “family” have become local leaders for Leslieville and Riverdale residents. “Most of the time it’s just, ‘Hey, you know what would be fun? Or what would be funny? Then we run with it and try to find a good cause, or some way to make it valuable or informative or rewarding for everyone,” says Conduit, who helped organize east end events like the Riverdale Art Walk and other art shows before opening The Avro. The Avro’s community engagement all started with a community garden she started as she and Dawson were renovating, and then a tobogganing excursion down Riverdale Hill later that winter, and snowballed from there. The next event, taking place on Saturday, just happens to be their first birthday party.

“There’s gonna be jugglers, magicians, a piñata… and I would love to have a pony there, but that’s just me. Even if it’s just Neil [Rankin, an Avro bartender] in an outfit.” Conduit jokes, but it’s that sense of community and fun that is giving the east end new air under its wings and new swagger in its step.

Take, for instance, another new project spearheaded by The Avro—the East End Icon calendar. Based on nominations and voting from the neigbourhood, Dawson and Conduit are going to produce a 12-month calendar featuring Leslieville’s loveliest lads, the finalist being announced at the party tomorrow. To fill the 12 spots they’ve received over 40 nominations and over 300 votes.

The decor of The Avro consists of revamped furniture and reclaimed accessories, including a lot of plane memorabilia. All transported by bike, of course.

Born out of a girl’s night between Conduit and fellow bartender Emily Obrien, the project evolved from a “who’s hunky in the ‘hood” concept to a project that will highlight the area’s unsung heroes. Like Old Man Ron.

“He’s about 80 years old, he lives behind Real Hardware. He walks up and down the strip every day, shovels the sidewalks, volunteers at Nellie’s, just the nicest guy. He’s lived in the nieghbourhood for years, knows everyone by name, everyone knows him. He’s a delight. It was like ‘What kind of recognition does Rob get?’” she says.

Then comes Avro Fest on October 22, a night of local bands, local food, local politics, and a tribute to Jack Layton at The Opera House. The Avro has also kickstarted a trend of bars staying open until 2 a.m. along Queen East, sparking more nightlife in a traditionally quiet area. Conduit says those in the east end have always known about its gems and hidden qualities, but projects like the East End Icon calendar and Avro Fest, and more late-night closing times, are signs that Leslievillers and Riverdalians are becoming more vocal and outspoken about their past-the-Parkway pride (especially given the East vs. West partisanship that underlies Toronto’s real estate).

“I spent two months in the Annex and I couldn’t hack it. I don’t want to shit-talk any neighbourhood! It’s just too big, there’s too many people to have a connection. But I hate when it gets into that, I mean we’re all wonderful!” Conduit says, which would sound insincere if she wasn’t blushing and physically writhing in guilt. “It’s like a small town over here. There’s a strong sense of community, friendly attitudes, very giving open people… We keep it a really nice secret on purpose, that’s my opinion. But also it’s not for everyone, just like the West End is not for everyone… Maybe I am getting a little peacock-feathered. But hey, we’re great. We’re allowed to say we’re great.”

 
Sandcastles are commonplace in the east end of Toronto, where they pop up and disappear with the tides along the Beach. Performance venues, however, are not as easy to come by. But a brand new space, the Red Sandcastle Theatre, is officially raising its curtain tonight in Leslieville, and it seems to have materialized along Queen Street East just as quickly as its shoreline namesakes. But its new owner and artistic director, Rosemary Doyle, hopes it will be a little more permanent.
“I’ve been saving for 20 years. This is something I’ve always wanted,” says Doyle, who was sitting in Sophie Mon Petit Cafe on the corner of Queen Street East and Logan Avenue when she first saw that the former paint-your-own-pottery studio was available for rent. “I knew I had to pounce when the opportunity arose. So I did.”

Out of two decades of looking at venues, this was one of the few that met all her criteria: open sightlines, available parking spots (at the neighbouring Value Village), and, most importantly, affordable rent. At 40, and after a recent split from her long-term partner, the timing seemed right, and as a longtime Leslieville resident, she knew the neighbourhood and local businesses. Still, it took a good ol’-fashioned near-death experience a few days later, as she spun out into a ditch on her way to Kingston, to push her to make the move.
“I kept thinking ‘If I die, what good is saving all that money?’ So here it is. Why not leap at it?” she says. “The next day I called [the landlord] and said ‘I’ve got the whole year—I’ve got the money for the whole year.’ And he held me to it when I got back [...] He asked if I wanted it, I said yes, then we went to the TD on the corner and I gave him all my money. Like, ‘Here’s all my money!’”
Now, one might assume that Doyle bumped her head a little harder than she thought when her car went tail-end into that ditch. A small business is always risky, especially an arts business, and according to trends, especially an arts business in the east. Since Bad Dog Theatre moved from its location at Broadview and Danforth earlier this year and the Danforth Music Hall shut down, the only places to catch a live show are a handful of bands in shoebox-sized bars, the over-the-big-top the Zero Gravity Circus, and The Opera House. By far the majority of Toronto’s theatres, from Tarragon to the Off-Bathurst Theatre District to basically all of the Fringe venues are set firmly to the west of Yonge. Once a theatre-goer passes Soulpepper in the Distillery District, choices for live theatre drop drastically. While Doyle’s “the more the merrier” approach to arts spaces in Toronto is definitely a step in the right direction, we’ve yet to see if a new venue will draw large enough audiences to this side of the Don to make a profit. The good thing is, though, that Doyle doesn’t really care about any of that.

Rosemary Doyle in her Red (looks green here) Sandcastle.

 
Having already paid the year’s rent, “Now I don’t have this burden of the rent every month. I have this place of fertility, to see if I can make it grow, and to see if it will bear fruit within the year,” she says. “That’s why I called it Red Sandcastle. Because R.E.D. are my initials, and sandcastle means that if after a year it goes away, it was still a beautiful thing.”
Since taking ownership on May 6, Doyle has been busy drywalling, setting up a lighting grid, building a dressing room, and painting the 400-square-foot room in bright yellow, green, and silver, and under the witness of the customers of Ed’s Real Scoop, the process has become a community project of sorts. Not one to be bashful, Doyle has no qualms in calling out for help, literally, and her pleas from within 922 Queen Street East have so far been answered by next-door neighbours, Value Village employees, and random kindly passersby who help with drywall, painting, and unloading furniture. One such aide turned out to be an artist himself, whose work then became Red Sandcastle’s first art show earlier this month.
Kicking off its theatrical programming tonight is Nearly Lear, a kid-friendly version of King Lear that has played the Sydney Opera House, Off-Broadway, and toured England and Scotland. But Doyle isn’t pigeonholing Red Sandcastle’s use. So far, it’s booked for summer camps, a birthday party, improv nights, and rehearsals for Fringe and Summerworks shows, with plans to start a play-reading group for new mothers and even weekly neighbourhood movie nights.
“I really want it to be this little creative hub that everyone can share in. Everyone can share in the fruits of my mid-life crisis,” she laughs, before correcting herself. “No, it’s not a crisis—it’s an opportunity.”
Sitting on an old couch inside the Red Sandcastle, paint stains her shoes and her nails, but when she’s asked how many hours she’s put into the renovations so far she gives a simple “Oh, who minds?” For her, the Red Sandcastle Theatre isn’t a job; it’s more of a “stay-bbatical,” a chance to fulfill a dream and add a little life to the neighbourhood outside of the weekend brunch rush.
“The great thing about sandcastles is that they can be built somewhere else,” she says, referring to the possibility that the east end can only support one kind of sandcastle. Doyle might be okay if the traces of Red Sandcastle eventually disappear, but, for the sake of Leslievillians, here’s hoping the neighbourhood can provide a more stable ground.
Photos by Carly Maga/Torontoist.

On Sunday, June 27, something disturbing happened at the intersection of Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue (which you know about in graphic detail already if you were following events as they unfolded). A crowd of hundreds of demonstrators and bystanders was penned in by riot police, then held in the street for about four hours, three of which happened to coincide with one of the most torrential of this summer’s many rain storms. Some members of the crowd were arrested; most were set free and allowed to leave on foot. The remaining details have been fleshed out repeatedly, here and elsewhere. But there is one detail that hasn’t featured prominently in any account of the incident: when police were ready to transport those arrested and handcuffed protesters away from the intersection, the vehicles onto which the prisoners were escorted were ordinary TTC buses, all of which are now presumably back to their normal business of ferrying tranced-out commuters from A to B and then to the shopping mall and back again.
During this G20 summit, Toronto’s streets, its infrastructure, and its police force were militarized. Whether or not these measures were appropriate is a question that still needs settling, but the emotional impact, at least, is pretty certain: seeing the city’s everyday accoutrements turned to the purpose of crowd control, for those of us not directly involved, was like finding out that a friendly neighbour used to be a Navy SEAL and that he once killed a guy using only a chopstick. Our everyday experience is now charged with violent potential. It changes the relationship.
The epitome of Toronto’s warlike transfiguration for the G20 summit was the temporary prisoner processing centre (that’s what the police call it) at the old Toronto Film Studios in Leslieville.

The Toronto Film Studios is an unprepossessing bunch of warehouse-sized buildings, whose previous brush with controversy was over a comparatively pedestrian issue. Developers wanted to turn the complex—which was mothballed in 2008 when owner Rose Corporation abandoned it in favour of their newly built Filmport Studios, now known as Pinewood Toronto Studios—into a big-box retail centre.
We visited the Toronto Film Studios temporary prisoner processing centre on Tuesday afternoon, after the last of its detainees had been released or transferred elsewhere. The Toronto Police Service had issued a press release just hours earlier, informing the media that they (TPS, not the media) would be hosting a guided tour of the facility. This was—not to besmirch the generosity of our hosts—undoubtedly a strategic move to help mitigate criticism from the press. Firsthand reports from people held in the prisoner processing centre during the G20 (like this one, and this one, and this one, and these, and all of these) describe a dirty, disorganized operation, staffed by overwhelmed police officers, some of whom were cruel and abusive. This was TPS’s opportunity to show Toronto that their temporary clink wasn’t really all that bad—at least, by prison standards.
Despite the short notice, press turnout was good. So good, in fact, that when Staff Superintendent Jeff McGuire, our tour guide, began to explain the order of the day in the gravel parking lot outside the facility, he was immediately surrounded by a tight semicircle of mics, cameras, and bodies. Media people call this a “scrum,” which, with its rugby-ish connotations, conveys an accurate idea of how competitive these things can get. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” said one of McGuire’s handlers. “This is just an explanation of what’s happening.” Those who had been slow to the scrum and couldn’t point their cameras directly at McGuire’s face began to gripe bitterly to one another.
McGuire somehow managed to placate the crowd long enough to give his explanation. “You’ll take the same walk as someone who’s been arrested,” he said. And then three videographers leaned in and tried to mic his tie.

McGuire leads us into a courtyard inside the complex. To the left is a soundstage full of white police bikes. To the right is a dark, hangar-sized building with a yawning entrance big enough for a truck. In front of us is a gate that leads to the street on the south side of the complex. That gate, McGuire tells us, is where the paddywagons entered.
We enter the hangar-sized building. Inside, against one of the walls, is a row of five makeshift cells, each about ten feet by twenty in area, and about ten feet tall, and each with a placard that bears a number. The walls and ceilings of the cells are made of an extremely heavy mesh, probably steel. They look like human-sized dog kennels (and in fact several people who were detained during the G20 described them that way after being released). Each cell has a neon orange portable toilet inside, with no door. This is the intake area, where prisoners were held for booking.
“We did our very best to provide facilities,” says McGuire, referring to the toilets.
We’re led through a door into another cavernous room. Instead of cages, it contains rows of trailers, each with a small office inside, with a desk, a computer, and a couple of chairs. McGuire tells us that this is where prisoners were brought for booking before being led to their cells, and that this is where handcuffs would have been removed, “if they were compliant.” Several people swept up in last weekend’s mass arrests make no mention of this area in their accounts. They claim to have been thrown directly into their cells with no charges laid (which is legal, for twenty-four hours or so after an arrest), and then left in handcuffs for up to a day. Some bits of the plastic zip-tie handcuffs used on prisoners were scattered on the concrete floor. The plastic is flexible, but very strong. It seems capable of producing bruises or bleeding, if pulled too tight. Later in the tour, when asked about bruising from handcuffs, McGuire will say, without accusing the processing centre’s prisoners directly, that there are cases “when they tighten it themselves, you know, to get attention.” The scrum will not be convinced.
To the right of the trailers is a row of what look like changing rooms. They’re made of plywood. On the doors are signs that say “Level II Search.” Further away, there are some plywood doors that say “Level III Search.” McGuire explains that “Level II” is a standard pat-down for weapons. “Level III,” meanwhile, is a strip search. Strip searches were performed, says McGuire, in cases when officers had reason to suspect that a prisoner was hiding weapons or other tools that might have facilitated escape (two National Post photographers who were arrested say they were strip searched here while in custody). Police procedure is to allow people to be strip searched by officers of their own gender. McGuire insists that this procedure was followed throughout the G20. Meanwhile, one journalist who was held in the processing centre says she saw several women strip-searched by male officers.
At this point, a rumour ripples through the scrum that a journalist has accidentally locked himself in one of the intake cells. “We’ll make sure he gets food and water,” deadpans McGuire.
In the area where prisoners were actually detained, we see some of the remnants of what they were given to eat and drink. Piles of orange peels and uneaten sandwiches wrapped in cellophane are scattered across the floors of several cells. The sandwiches are on white bread of approximately Wonder quality. Inside each is what looks like a single square of yellow processed cheese. Several people report having had to wait hours for these sandwiches. (“I wouldn’t dispute that some prisoners didn’t get food as quick as they’d like,” said McGuire.) Over by the booking trailers is a box with some unopened granola bars, bags of Cheetos, and whole apples. Prisoners were given styrofoam cups to sip water out of, since allowing them bottles would, we’re told, have created a security concern. The cups, at least, seem to have been useful in helping to stave off boredom. The floors of many cells are covered in drifts of finely shredded styrofoam bits. One cell is decorated with cups that had been torn into dangly spirals and hung from the ceiling, like wind chimes. The portable toilets in the cells emit a faint smell of urine. Most cells have a single bench running the length of a wall.
Each cell, says McGuire, was built to hold about ten people, but could have handled up to twenty. Some who were detained in the facility say that their cells contained more than twenty people. One person who was detained claims that he was locked up with thirty-five.
Police estimate that one thousand people were arrested over the course of the weekend. The prisoner processing centre was built to hold five hundred people at a time, and likely exceeded that at the height of the summit. Nobody’s sure by how much.
In a corner of the building is an area that isn’t a stop on the guided tour, with a number of smaller cells, built to hold one or two people. We stumble across a small, windowless, dry-walled room with a foam-insulated door. It’s dark inside, there’s no toilet, and the only furniture is a blue cot. A printed label on the door reads: “THE HOLE.”

The entire facility was under video surveillance throughout the weekend.

What’s especially striking about the temporary prisoner processing centre is how well-built everything seems. For a makeshift jail, it’s extremely kitted out, complete with metal detectors, photocopiers, biometric scanners, and even what looks like a miniature X-ray machine for baggage, similar to the kind used in airports. There are even custom-built wooden boardwalks between the booking trailers. It’s a testament to the monstrous size of Toronto’s federal G20 security budget that such a place could have been assembled for what ended up being only about three days’ worth of use. It has the basic amenities needed to sustain prisoners for a day or so. It’s a cheerless and uncomfortable place—but it’s a prison, after all.
More disturbing than the state of the facility itself are reports of police conduct that could generously be described as sloppy, and will probably be cast as malicious by ex-detainees, should they file any lawsuits against TPS in the aftermath of this fiasco. The vast majority of those who spent time in the processing centre were released with no charges (only two- to three hundred were charged with crimes, according to police). There were surveillance cameras suspended every fifteen feet from the ceiling of the processing centre, so an independent inquiry would have plenty of objective evidence to sift through.
The scrum was very interested in finding out whether or not McGuire felt the police had acted appropriately. He was understandably reluctant to disparage his organization. Regardless, TPS public relations is in for a hard few months.
“What I would really like to know,” said one cameraman jokingly to one of TPS’s public relations officers, “is what movies were filmed here.”
“What do I look like, the internet?” said the officer.
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Photos by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.