IN THE FRAME
Remembering a day of violence at Queen’s Park, 20 years ago,
There is a dent in Stephen Giles’ forehead that turned 20 years old this week.
On March 18, 1996, Ontario Provincial Police officers in riot gear plowed paths through striking provincial public service workers, making way for politicians to enter Queen’s Park.
It was a showdown between Mike Harris’s newly minted Progressive Conservative government and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), which exercised its first legal opportunity to strike.
And it was ugly. A handful of strikers were injured, as well as a Toronto police officer who inserted herself between the OPP and the workers in an attempt to protect them from baton-swinging officers.
Among the injured was Giles, then 31, a probation officer and union steward. Now a full-time unionist with OPSEU, he reflects on the day when a whack to the head by a police truncheon briefly turned out his lights and permanently altered his career path.
It was a crisp late winter morning, and Giles, chilled, moved his picket duty to a patch of sunshine east of the Whitney Block, a building that houses cabinet minister offices and the office of the premier.
OPP officers, wearing body armour and wielding shields and truncheons, came up a driveway, which had a chain across the top of it where the driveway met the sidewalk. Some spilled over the chain and Giles ended up amid their ranks.
“I remember getting hit in the back by something,” Giles recalls. And the last “piece of memory” he has is running into an officer. “He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. It was like, ‘How the hell did we get here?’ And then, it was lights out.”
I was there that day for the Star as a reporter-photographer and snapped the photo you see here. For Giles, it best reflected the events of March 18, which would be dissected in a provincial inquiry.
“One of the advantages of posttraumatic amnesia is I have no recollection of being hit over the head, and I have no recollection of being hit subsequent to being hit over the head, although the reports say that I was,” Giles says.
Through media coverage, he adds, “I’ve been able to reconstruct what happened.” And then there is the other reminder: “I still have a dent in my forehead where they knocked the chunk of skin out.”
In the photo, Giles, bleeding and unconscious, is surrounded by more than a half-dozen officers, only one of whom looks his way.
Giles has never met Jay Hope, the OPP inspector in charge of the scene, standing to the right in the picture, police radio in hand.
Hope defended the OPP that day, saying it was “not the OPP way” to bash demonstrators and that officers engaged only after “they were engaged first.” Striking workers told a different story, that the OPP behaved like “animals.” The Star quoted an unnamed Toronto officer using the same descriptor.
Some changes came of that day, Giles says.
“The OPP is no longer in charge of security outside of Queen’s Park,” he notes. “Certainly Toronto police services, generally, have done a better job at controlling the big public events, unless you fast-forward to the G20, where they demonstrated a whole new level of . . . ” (He laughs.)
In his own life, the incident led him to move full time into union work. There was a lawsuit and a settlement he can’t talk about. (Hint: He is not driving a nice car.)
“I try to look at life with a good sense of humour and I have a great deal of fun with irony,” he says. “The worst possible scenario that came out of that is that I became file footage. Every time that there was a review of the Mike Harris administration . . . that clip from that day would always be part of it.”
For OPSEU, May 18 was a “major flashpoint,” Giles says. The union, which then represented 35,000 Ontario public service workers, has since broadened and grown to 135,000 members. It does “more work, generally, for the middle working class” beyond government workers, Giles says.
Another change, Giles notes: “It’s interesting that what the Tories weren’t able to accomplish in terms of reducing the size of the (public service) and continuing to privatize and sell off different parts of government, the Liberals have certainly picked up the baton and continued on that path.”