Vindication.

That's what the Ontario ombudsman's Andre Marin's report sounds like to me.

As a peaceful protester during the G20 demonstrations, I saw and experienced Toronto as a police state where the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms no longer applied. While the mainstream media couldn't tear the cameras away from burning cruisers, police officers were conducting illegal searches, used excessive force and the provincial government quietly withdrew our rights.

Twenty years ago this month, the founding conference of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) took place. In the two decades that have followed, OCAP has organized and mobilized communities under attack in the context of an advancing agenda of neoliberalism. The present situation is dominated by a world-wide crisis of capitalism and, as a result, an intensified drive to impose austerity on working class populations and the poor in particular. We are in the early stages of this assault but it seems likely that it will dominate the period that lies ahead. On this basis, it makes sense to assess the work of OCAP from the standpoint of building effective resistance to the neoliberal agenda.

In the wake of the recent wave of queer teen suicides due to homophobic bullying, it would be a mistake for Ontario voters to trivialize the Oct. 25 province-wide municipal election of our school trustees. School trustees are also elected in four other provinces across Canada over the next few weeks. If education is a great equalizer in our society, many schools are still not doing enough to provide equal access of education for our LGBTQ students.

Too often, we tend to merely pay attention to LGBTQ students when one of them commits suicide. Last month, we witnessed a string of queer-related teen suicides across the U.S., with one of the victims being an eighth-grader who killed himself in Texas because he was "bullied to death" for being gay, according to his family.

As we enter the final stretch of the Toronto municipal election, two things have become abundantly clear.

First, we need a new and better way of electing our mayor and city councillors. A voting system that forces many people to vote strategically rather than sincerely, and that creates a council not reflecting our city's diversity, has no place in a 21st-century democracy. Second, we need a process to identify the best system or systems for Toronto -- a course being promoted by the Toronto chapter of Fair Vote Canada.

Only when humans are again permitted to build authentic urbanism -- those cities, towns, and villages that nurture us by their comforts and delights -- will we cease the despoiling of Nature by escaping to sprawl.

- Andrés Duany, 'Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream'