LONDON, ONT. - It was a loud and boisterous scene outside the massive Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) factory on Jan. 21 as more than a thousand trade unionists joined the picket line in solidarity with 465 workers who have been locked out by the company for the past three weeks. With a punk rock band blasting music from a makeshift stage by the front gate, hundreds of workers disrupted traffic by crossing back and forth across the road regularly. A lone London police officer pleaded with them to keep things moving. It was the second show of support that day; earlier, an estimated 7,000 workers from across Ontario and the Midwest United States rallied at Victoria Park in downtown London.

It was a sweltering afternoon in late July 2002 when the armoured vehicles of the Toronto Police Emergency Task Force pulled up in front of our building. Quickly we started barricading the door with an old desk, if they were coming to kick us out we weren't going to make it easy for them. We waited tensely as the cops approached the door with submachine guns drawn. Our crime? We dared to take over an abandoned building in the middle of a housing crisis. We all survived that early raid and were eventually allowed back into the building where we lived for the next three months -- dubbing it the "Pope Squat" as we occupied it during the pontiff's visit to Toronto.

Ken Torres was in Toronto on Monday on a trip with two of his co-workers from New York City. Like many visitors they went to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). However, they weren't there to look at dinosaur skeletons and other artifacts -- they came to put up a picket line.

Torres, 40, and his co-workers are members of the Teamsters union Local 814 and are skilled art handlers for the New York location of Sotheby's, one of the world's elite art auction houses. Torres and 43 of his coworkers have been locked out since July 29, 2011. The small Sotheby's office in Canada used the ROM Monday night to hold one of its bi-annual auctions of Canadian art.

If there was one word that could sum up the Occupy Toronto eviction it would be "painstaking."

The enforcement of the trespass order started at roughly 6 a.m. and took 12 hours over the course of Wednesday. The Occupy Toronto camp stood for 40 days in St. James Park in downtown Toronto. In that time, the Occupy movement held scores of general assemblies, hundreds of smaller meetings, many workshops, rallies and protest marches and countless personal conversations between people.

Occupy Toronto has joined Occupy Vancouver with the distinction of appealing to the court system for the right to stay encamped in their respective locations. Superior Court Judge David Brown has granted a temporary stay of the eviction order by the City of Toronto, which will be argued in court on Friday with a final decision no later than Saturday at 6 p.m.

In his ruling Judge Brown wrote "The purpose of my interim order is to preserve the status quo as it existed at the time the Notice was served earlier today."