André Marin, the Ombudsman of Ontario, got preposterously, massively, carried away when he said that the authorities' overreaction during the G20 summit from June 25 to June 27, 2010, was "the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history."
The abuses by a number of police officers, and their gravely defective supervision and training, were and are shocking, but they are far from equalling the internment of the Japanese Canadians in detention camps from 1942 to the end of the Second World War; that deprivation of their liberty was accompanied by major expropriations of property; moreover, a program of removal to Japan was launched after the war.
To go farther back in Canadian history, the sufferings of some protesters and some mere passersby at the G20 are hardly of the same rank as the deportation of the Acadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana in the 1750s.
During Mr. Marin's work for his report, dramatically titled Caught in the Act, he may have become overexcited by the realization that an obscure regulation, the consequences of which during the G20 summit he was asked to investigate, was based on a wartime measure to protect public facilities, enacted during an emergency session of the legislature soon after Canada declared war in 1939.
The Ombudsman has also belittled a part of Canadian history with a more direct link to the wartime of the 1940s: the invocation of the War Measures Act in October, 1970, based on the claim of an apprehended insurrection, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of about 500 people on no specified charges. Mr. Marin is probably right that the arrest of about 1,105 people in the course of a weekend was "the largest mass arrest in Canadian history," but that observation may have led him on to his exaggerations to reporters about a state of affairs that amounted to "martial law."
An ombudsman should be a calm arbitrator between citizens and the state, but Mr. Marin has spoken like an inflammatory orator. There was no coup d'état and no junta in Toronto in June, 2010.