ABSTRACT
On the evening of Friday, 2 June 2006 and into the next morning, some 400 heavily armed members of a joint ‘counter-terrorism’ task force (consisting of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and the Ontario Provincial Police, as well as the Metropolitan Toronto, York, Durham and Peel regional police forces) conducted a series of raids across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) arresting 17 young men, most in their twenties and five of them youths, charged under Canada’s Anti-Terrorist Act with plotting bomb attacks on several sites in Southern Ontario. Considered one of the largest ‘terrorist sweeps’ in North America since 11 September 2001, the arrests of what the media came to dub ‘the Toronto 17’2 put ‘Toronto the Good’ in the international spotlight for days while the provincial courthouse, in the Toronto suburb of Brampton, where the suspects were arraigned was transformed into a veritable fortress, under siege by local and international news media as much as law enforcement officers (which included sharpshooters on nearby rooftops and tactical units armed with submachine guns).
