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Bill Blair, at a media display of the weapons seized in Toronto over the weekend, said this:

“Some people came to Toronto not to protest around a specific issue or to advocate for any change,” Blair told a lobby full of reporters and colleagues. “They came to attack our city. They came to attack the summit. They came to commit crimes and to victimize people in this city. The evidence of their intent is on display before you today.”

The cache of items “demonstrates the extent of the criminal conspiracy that existed and was dealt with over the course of this weekend in which people came to this city, conspired and agreed together and came with ample preparation to wreak havoc and to commit crimes in our city,” Blair said.

“No one should be so naive as to think that this is the actions of (people) whose purpose was to engage in lawful, peaceful protest,” Blair said. “I think the evidence that is displayed before you of weaponry, of items that could be used to destroy property, to attack the police and the public, items capable of delivering deadly force, truly demonstrates the extent of this criminal conspiracy and the intent of those who came to engage in this conduct.”

Right. But then this came up:

Police also displayed a crossbow and chainsaw seized in an incident on Friday that they said had no ties to the summit. When asked, Chief Blair acknowledged they were unrelated, but said “everything else” had been confiscated from demonstrators.

Well, anyone can make a mistake. Surely everything else was…what? Next paragraph in that story:

On Wednesday, however, Michael Went and Doug Kerr e-mailed a letter to Chief Blair saying their bamboo poles may have been included in the exhibit. As they headed to a picnic to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots on Sunday morning, police seized seven or eight of the long poles, citing the G20 summit. The couple had planned to use the poles to fly a rainbow flag and decorate the park.

Huh. Well, maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe the bamboo poles were supposed to be in the bamboo pole display and were simply misplaced. It’s not like he vividly described them as weapons when the police information was that they were not. No, he saved that for something else:

Brian Barrett was shocked to go online Tuesday and see a photo gallery showing toy weapons seized from him while en route to Mississauga for a fantasy role-playing game.

His hand-made scale armour, cushion-tipped arrows and hockey-taped shields were among the items Toronto Police chief Bill Blair said were “seized from criminals” who wreaked havoc on the city Saturday.

…

“Some of the things that are related are these arrows with devices tied on to them so that they could pour gas on them, ignite them and shoot them at us,” Blair said. “That was seized from criminals.”

Not so, said Barrett, “champion of Twilight Peak” and weapons safety officer for a 15th century role-playing game called Amtgard.

I don’t know what’s worse - the fact that Toronto appears to have a police chief who is a liar (we know that from the fence thing) or that Toronto has a police chief who might be subject to paranoid fantasies about the police being assaulted with flaming arrows, despite those arrows having been seized days before the G20 Summit from someone with a plausible explanation for possessing them who presumably provided that explanation to the police during the hour in which he was detained by them.

A couple of necessary steps along the road to no longer being a tremendous debacle of a franchise were taken today as Steve Tambellini continued to clean up the mess left by Kevin Lowe. There’s not much to say about Ethan Moreau - a useful piece of the Oilers through the end of the 2005-06 season, at which point he became grossly overpaid. I’ve gone back and looked at what I had to say when the deal was signed, which was this:

I don’t think that penalty killing is well enough understood to know the value of the contribution that he makes there but at the very least, I think it’s obvious that he’s being paid, at least in part, for his past contributions to the team. If Ethan Moreau’s twin brother walked in off the street and the Oilers knew that he could provide the same contribution, I can’t see them signing him. He’s at the top of the list for guys in his class of player in terms of salary now. I hope that those types of player are serious contributors because hard decisions will be made because of this and other contracts that seemed to be a bit on the high side in the past few months.

As it turned out, Moreau, for all his good qualities, wasn’t much in the way of a contributor to making things go and the Oilers paid the price for that, losing some people because of overpayments to him and others. It got ugly the past few years and it had to be a pretty humiliating end (although he sort of begged for the humiliation with his quotes along the way) but I’ve always hoped guys do well when they leave Edmonton (Pronger notwithstanding) so I hope Moreau can catch on somewhere where he doesn’t have the responsibility and omniscient media presence that comes with being the captain and wrap up a fine career with another lengthy playoff run.

As for Tambellini - I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this is the easy stuff. The hard part is spending the money wisely and making smart moves. We’ll see what he does.

Update: Uh, so it seems everyone jumped the gun on this. He’s actually been claimed by Columbus. It probably goes without saying but I’m inclined to think that this is a pretty awful move for Columbus. Like horrifically awful. Early thinking seems to be that Columbus is going to slot him in on their third line with Sammy Pahlsson. It’s a role he hasn’t been able to handle for, oh, four years. Unbelievably bad.

Update: And Patrick O’Sullivan has been traded to Phoenix for Jim Vandermeer, who was also on waivers. Both players have apparently been bought out. This is essentially the Oilers transferring $730K to Phoenix which leads to the question? What else did Edmonton get back? And have the Oilers now, five years in, learned how to use being a wealthy club and the CBA to their advantage?

Toronto’s mayor (and fellow U of T law grad) David Miller speaks:

“If you think of the impossible job those police officers had when people are literally fighting and in demonstration, seeking to use innocent people as a cover for their activity, it’s a very, very difficult job. I felt the police distinguished themselves in that job as best anyone could expect. They acted with professionalism and with respect for people’s rights to lawfully demonstrate while trying to keep the peace.”

I’ve taken a picture and numbered the two cops you should watch during this. In the seconds preceding this screen shot, the police officer labelled “1″ has struck the big haired fellow with the megaphone with his baton. He proceeds to pepper spray the fellow sitting on the ground in front of him and then the officer labelled “2″ decides to whack the guy a few times. I have no idea how this can possibly be justified as an appropriate use of force.

Interestingly, none of these officers appear to be wearing visible badge numbers. I’m going to go back through my photos of police in riot gear and see if they were wearing visible numbers. David Miller has been helpfully suggesting that anyone with complaints against the police make those complaints through the process that has been established. I’m not sure how useful those complaints will be when all you can tell them is that you were assaulted by someone dressed in black and wearing a mask that covered his face; I hear there were a lot of problems with those people over the weekend.

The Star with stories from people who were arrested.

Dalton McGuinty refuses to speak:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty will not explain why his cabinet passed a secret law giving police more power to arrest people during the G20 summit in Toronto.

Opposition critics and civil libertarians are outraged the Liberal cabinet not only gave police extra powers to question, search and detain people in the week leading up to the summit, but that they also kept it secret.
…

McGuinty’s cabinet passed the regulation quietly on June 2 with no debate in the legislature.

McGuinty’s office said the premier will not be available to respond to questions about the need to pass a law that critics say suspended civil liberties in downtown Toronto without telling anyone.

Instead, the premier’s office referred reporters to a newspaper ad with the headline: What you need to know about the G20 summit.

The ad talks about restrictions to people who want to enter the secured summit area, but it makes no mention of the special powers given to police to arrest people during the G20 week.

I’m going to write some more about this law later this week but it’s one of the more odious aspects of this.

Qualified: Brule, Cogliano, JDD, Dubnyk, Fraser, Gagner, Jacques, O’Marra, Peckham and Reddox
Not qualified: Potulny, Pouliot, Paukovich, Trukhno, Hrabel and Lerg

Four quick thoughts: (1) The Oilers are at least sort of worried about the possibility of Khabibulin not being available to start the year and are keeping both goalies as a cheap insurance policy. (2) I’m disappointed in Pouliot not being qualified as I thought he could be a useful lower end guy. Part of the reason that the Hawks won the Stanley Cup is because they had four lines that could play. I felt like Pouliot could have turned into a player who could be a useful piece of depth on a good team if he could ever stay healthy. For what he costs and what he could be, he seems like a useful roll of the dice to me. (3) Ditto for Ryan Potulny. (4) I don’t even know what to say about JF Jacques at this point. Rick Olczyk said “Jacques did a great job for us before he got injured,” which, you know, seems insane, since Jacques was a sinkhole. Good players get killed playing with him. I think that the Oilers are targetting a certain sort of player for the bottom two lines - big and strong - which is all fine and well, provided that these guys can play hockey.

More G20:

When you watch that, look for the cop in the middle of the picture. When the song ends and the line advances, he, unlike some of his colleagues, doesn’t slow up once people start moving - he lunges for a guy with his riot shield. And misses. And falls over. I’d guess he hasn’t had his pound of protestor flesh yet. You can clearly see some of the others ease off the charge as soon as the protestors disperse. I’m cognizant that the cops can’t be asked to measure their response with the degree of exactitude a guy sitting in an apartment a few blocks away can but lunging at people who might get away seems a bit much.

I went out and wandered around during the G20 yesterday. Here’s what I saw

This is a view onto Yonge and Wellington at around 2PM yesterday afternoon:

At the intersection of Yonge and Wellington, this fellow told me that there was no access to Wellington unless you had ID permitting you to be there:

It became very clear after a few minutes of talking to him that this wasn’t the case at all. The police do not seem to have been particularly well co-ordinated yesterday - it was very easy to just walk around individual barricades. I walked north one block to King Street, which doesn’t usually look like this on a Saturday:

A block down Bay Street and I was on Wellington. That’s the controversial fence there in the background:

Here’s the sign on the fence. I went to the Jays-Cards game on Thursday night and none of these signs were up. One of my biggest complaints about the whole thing is the law that was passed quietly. I assume the reason that these signs weren’t up then was that the police and the government were trying to keep the law quiet:

This is looking north, up University Avenue. The police were setting shifting perimeters to try and keep the protestors away from the fence. If the cops didn’t identify you as a potential threat, you were able to move around pretty freely. It was kind of reminiscent of what you read about how hard it is to fight guerilla wars if you’re the superior power. The protestors made it sort of easy for the police by approaching downtown in a large group. If they had moved in in small groups of two or three, keeping some of the more obvious signs that they were protestors hidden, I don’t know how the police could have stopped them from making it to the fence.

Soldiers on the streets of our cities. In Canada:

Looking west on King, just east of Yonge. This is while the cop cars were on fire:

While the police were adamant that I couldn’t walk west on King on that point, they weren’t really securing things. I walked half a block south to Colborne Street, where there were no police, and walked west:

The police shut down this woman’s hair appointment and closed the salon:

Two Russian tourists out walking around Toronto with a bottle of tequila. Good guys, who figure that they’re going to get arrested:

The most intimidating thing I saw from the police was when the riot police advanced. They would beat on their shields with their batons in unison. Definitely not something I’d want to be on the other side of:

At the intersection of Bay and King:

CIBC’s unfortunate new motto:

Arrests on King Street. The girls being arrested said that they were arrested because they refused an order to move.

I zoomed in on the placard in the back of the unmarked police van. It looks to me like it’s a statement of rights of persons arrested, I guess to make it easier for the police to advise them of their rights?

After going home to watch the Ghana-USA game and charge my camera battery, I went out again. We quickly happened across a deserted Terroni, which has good food. So we stopped and ate.

These people had umbrellas in a convertible. They don’t seem to get how convertibles work:

The police were using Greyhounds to shuttle the riot crews around. I observed a lot of unmarked, unlighted police cars running red lights, which struck me as awfully dangerous:

It’s hard to tell what this vehicle is but it has mesh wire for windows and is completely unmarked. I’ve never seen anything like it:

This fellow, who I think was OPP, was taking pictures of people observing the police. I’m a little troubled by this - he clearly wasn’t filming any trouble, just taking pictures of people who happened to be there observing. One wonders what sort of files the police build and whether the pictures that they take will be shared with other police forces outside of Canada:

The police have rented a lot of vehicles for this. Judging by the driving I’ve seen, if you rented a vehicle to the police, they probably took at least that much value out of it. Lots of vehicles getting driven very hard. Also, the location of stickers has been unfortunate:

I have to admit, as someone with a UofT Scotiabank loan, I’m sympathetic to these people:

But then the bastards went too far:

One other point - I’ll probably write a longer point about this at some point but the police pretty obviously infiltrated what was going on. I observed some persons who I can only assume were police, at the northeast corner of Bay and King, stowing protest flags in a police van. They were dressed like protestors and had nothing on them to indicate that they were police, something that everyone else I saw had.

It’s a fascist kind of day today - laws suspending civil liberties are passed in secret, Chile’s playing Spain in the World Cup, Strasburg’s in the majors (strikeouts are fascist) but at 7:00 PM EST, communism takes the stage as the Oilers will draft one of Taylor Hall or Tyler Seguin. Live chat starts around 6:45 p.m.

After four years of supporting a team that’s currently saddled with a GM who uses “words” like “re-meet” and decides to spin an epic disaster by announcing that he intends to advance the plan (I guess the Oilers will become defunct a year earlier now), I’m quite enjoying the slipstream jingoism that one can bask in by rooting for the English at the World Cup. Do I smirk a bit at the deification of John Terry for diving towards a kicked ball? Well, the last time my hockey team was worth watching, one of the guys dove face first at a puck in G5 against Detroit and he didn’t even need to redeem himself for sleeping with one of his teammate’s wives and attempting to lead an insurrection against the coach, so of course I do. Do I laugh at Landon Donovan’s asinine interview (watch the whole thing)?

Yes, for obvious reasons, although I’m still pulling for the USA against Ghana.

But before we get to that, we have the resolution of the tiresome Taylor/Tyler debate on Friday. A couple of people have asked, so I figured I’d post a note - I’l do a chat here. While it doesn’t have quite the drama that we can expect this weekend, hopes will still be dashed:

mc79hockey: I think that as people who blog/comment on the Oil online, we should all be hoping that they don’t get Pääjärvi-Svensson

there will presumably be news about the sale of the Coyotes:

mirtle: From The Globe’s Paul Waldie: “Jerry Reinsdorf has made an offer worth roughly $130 million for the Phoenix Coyotes.”

Geography will be discussed:

mc79hockey: The guy at the podium referenced western florida for some reason.

OilW30: they’re in southeast florida, but he said west florida

OilW30: panhandle is north florida

Derek: You guys are donkeys

Derek: he said “Weston Florida”

Derek: As in the city of Weston

Don’t miss it!

I was googling for Khabibulin news today and couldn’t help but be astounded at how ugly the options that Google gives you when you type his name in are:

Yikes. I also learned that his constitutional argument has been rejected. As I say every time I write about this, I don’t practice DUI law in Arizona but this strikes me as pretty bad for Khabibulin. A lot of the practice of law is looking for opportunities for leverage over the other side to force an agreement that your client can live with. As I’ve discussed from time to time here, it seems possible that any agreement that sees him convicted could impact on Khabby’s ability to enter Canada.

If there was a plea bargain to be had here, I would have thought that it would have been made by now. Khabibulin’s hand is weaker now than it was before he went to court today. The prosecution’s hand is stronger because it now knows that the evidence it has was constitutionally obtained. I would think that the trial now would come down to whether Khabby’s lawyer can convince the jury that the cops screwed up in handling the evidence and that they can’t rely on it. Again, while I can’t emphasize enough that I don’t practice criminal law, it seems to me that this whole motion is the sort of thing you bring when you’ve got no good option, because it didn’t seem like a good one.

If I were betting, I’d guess that he’s going to get convicted of extreme DUI, assuming that the police haven’t mishandled the evidence. Qualifying offers are due one week from today; as I’ve said before, if the Oilers qualify both JDD and DD, they’re worried. And, given the glut of goalies who are less bad than JDD available, dumb, although we’ve already got ample evidence of that. Like the fact that Khabibulin is an Oiler on a four year $15MM deal.

It’s all very circular.

I’m surfing through some salary information at the moment and came across a couple of interesting things. The two teams that spent the most money on salary this year in the NHL? Philadelphia and Chicago. This is actual dollars, not cap hits. The Hawks spent $64.5MM - in a league with a $56.8MM cap and Philly spent $62MM.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Islanders spent only $38MM, plus whatever bonuses Tavares hit. I’d think that he, at most, hit his “A” schedule bonuses of $850K. The three hockey players who took the most money out of the Islanders this year? Rick DiPietro, Mark Streit and Alexei Yashin. Ouch. You’d have to think that Sheldon Souray might be attractive to them, because you can pay him less than his cap hit. In a related story, the Islanders are picking fifth in the draft.

I’ve got escrow on the mind at the moment - I’m working on something longer that talks about the NHLPA and escrow - but if I endured the waking hell that must be playing for the New York Islanders (all forms of waking hell are relative, obviously), it would drive me completely insane that I was paying part of my salary back to the NHL so that the Blackhawks and Flyers can spend far more money than they’re ostensibly permitted to. At the very least, I’d hope that the Hawks would reward me with a Stanley Cup ring - if they’re giving them out to people who carefully built explosives set for July 1 into the foundation of the Hawks, they really ought to give them to people who’ve done nothing to hurt them and actually took money from their own pockets to pay the league back for the Hawks’ and Flyers’ profligacy.