this is actually the same legal question i was up against a few years ago; the police think they can hold people on hybrid offences, and they can't. apparently, one of them is being held without any charge at all. you can expect that the justice released these people as soon as she was able to see the case.

see, and i think that the people on the street need a dose of reality as to the length of time required to process these individuals, to actually get the case in front of a justice. what i picked up from my own illegal arrest is that i was scheduled at the end of the day, because the first six hours of the day had already been booked by people coming in from the county jail. the precedent in canada is that habeas corpus is 24 hours, so there is no legal basis of complaint as long as they release you in 24 hours. that has led to a habit of scheduling randoms picked up on the street to the end of the day, after the day's scheduled appearances are done.

if there were more justices, or less inmates, then these things could be processed much faster. i guess that means that the protesters are really complaining about subpar social services, at the end of the day.

the cops need people to file cases in these situations and take them to court to get them to stop doing it. they do it because they get away with it, and it has to stop. that's why i'm suing, and i hope they sue as well.

so, what the cop should have done under canadian law was issue a summons to appear in court on charges of vandalism. while the police technically have the powers of arrest on charges involving hybrid offenses, they are supposed to only utilize it subject to a series of clauses that has been completely ejected from the process and was almost certainly not met, in this case.

that said, i do believe that a proper sentence once the issue works it's way into court would be to order these individuals to clean the statues. the placement of statues is a legitimate topic of democratic debate; their wanton destruction is most unfortunate, and quite barbaric. should it be democratically decided that these statues, which appear to have been of john a. macdonald (a drunk and a corrupt asshole no doubt), should no longer grace the steps of our parks and institutions, the correct step to take next would be to move them to museums, not douse them in paint.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/07/18/blm-toronto-continues-to-press-demands-to-defund-police-service/