In the early hours of Tuesday morning, an overwhelming force of Toronto police surrounded and broke up a peaceful housing protest in Allan Gardens, a park in downtown Toronto.
The park had been occupied since the previous Saturday by a group of homeless and their supporters who were protesting the terrible housing crisis in the city.
The only response of the city to this crisis has been to increase police harassment of the homeless, a policy called "Target policing."
Allan Gardens was, for three nights, a "Safe Park", a place where the homeless could sleep free from police harassment.
Hundreds of people visited the park to show their support.
But the media launched a vicious attack on the Safe Park.
The Toronto Star gave front page coverage to a disgusting column which denounced the homeless protest, and offered nothing as an alternative for the hundreds who every night sleep rough in the city.
This media witchhunt was the set up to the police clampdown, which resulted in 27 arrests.
The struggle is far from over.
Last Friday evening, two hundred students and community members returned to the Safe Park area to protest the police assault.
They were confronted by 60 riot and mounted police.
But when it started to rain, the police left and the protesters stayed.
Oriel Varga of the University of Toronto Women's Centre put the case of the protesters clearly.
"Saying it is illegal to sleep in a public space is tantamount to saying homelessness is illegal. If the shelters are filled, is jail the only legal place for a homeless person to sleep? Without funding and resources the homeless are not going to go away, and neither will we."
The city claims to have insufficient resources to deal with the homeless crisis.
But it is contemplating spending $2.8 billion dollars to stage the Olympics. They claim it will turn an $87-million profit.
But we know from the experience of the Skydome, the Olympic Stadium in Montreal and all the other failed mega-projects of the past, that this is a lie. The only people who will profit from the Olympics will be the rich developers who will get the lucrative contracts.
Working people and the poor will pay for the Olympics in increased taxes for years.
And resources that could go to providing real accommodation for the 4,000 who sleep in shelters every night, will go to luxurious and unnecessary sports palaces.
The answer to the housing crisis is simple -- build homes for the homeless, not stadiums for the corporations.