Vancouver 'Gastown riots' August 7, 1971One thousand protesters clashed with police in 'The Battle of Maple Tree Square,' angered by the actions of undercover police agents and their targeting of 'hippies' who advocated the legalization of marijuana. The cops arrested seventy-nine and charged thirty-eight with various offenses. Mayor Tom Campbell went on an anti-hippie rampage, attempting to invoke the War Measures Act against the flower children, draft dodgers, and anti-war protesters, a number of whom led a symbolic invasion of the United States soon after the marijuana protests, surging into Blaine, Washington.
A judicial inquiry into the Gastown events headed by Justice Thomas Dohm heard lurid police testimony of the role of 'professional revolutionaries' in orchestrating the events, a number of whom turned out to be local poets. Dohm concluded that the police had rioted and, in their indiscriminate beatings, use of riot batons, and unprecedented employment of horse-backed charges on crowds of tourists and onlookers, had overstepped the bounds of their authority.
-- Brian D. Palmer, Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era
