I just started a petition on Change.org to stop this process!

I read your comment and only assumed that they ahd some sort of permit to do this. If not, it is hard to blame the city official when his / her job is to protect the integrity of the public use park.

Sure the garden was for everyone, but I would not want every park in the city to become a garden.

I manage a public garden, and if someone showed up and tore up part of the lawn without asking, you can be damn sure it would get fixed.  People who manage public parks and gardens invest their emotional energy into providing a beautiful space to be enjoyed by the public at large, and it's insulting to assume that the manager of the Toronto Parks Dept is some sort of jackbooted nazi type instead of a reasonable human being.  

I'm fully in support of the Occupy movement, but the problem from the beginning imho has been a lack of creative and cooperative steps toward creating solutions.  Without direction and forward momentum, the movement quickly devolved into a bunch of entitled middle-class prissy white kids sitting on street corners and demanding some sort of poorly defined "change," without having the gumption to either use aggressive tactics or to create cooperation and outreach within the community.  Every successful social change movement has employed at least one of these tactics; absent that, it becomes routine for the authorities to come in and mop em up.

So Occupy Toronto was halfway there - they developed a cooperative, communally based movement to do something constructive like planting a free community garden.  But then they failed to contact someone from the park and get permission??  If someone came to me in my capacity as a garden manager and said, "We've got a bunch of great volunteers who want to plant a free community garden and we would like to use part of your grassy area to do so," I would say, "Great! let me show you where would be an acceptable place to do so, where you won't be cutting any sprinkler lines with shovels or screwing up the flow that's intended to draw visitors through our garden space.  Let's reroute sprinkler lines so that your community garden can be on the automatic watering system.  Here are some tools and maybe even some professional help to get you going."  

But they just show up one day, tear out some grass, possibly cut sprinkler lines, and do other damage and then they're surprised when the park manager has it torn out??  Guerrilla gardening is awesome, but it's only effective in otherwise abandoned spaces.  A public park managed by a functional park authority is certainly not abandoned, and there would have been a better way of doing this.

Effective possibly as a protest method, but not sustainable in the long term.  A great example at the micro level of the general failings of Occupy at the macro level.

"a couple of people are asking 'was it legal in the first place?' to grow food.. FREE FOOD.. on public land..are you kidding me?"

nail meet hammer!

I was reading those comments and I thought, how completely absurd that anyone would question the  correct and right thinking of creating a public garden on public lands

It is absurd to think, "grass" constitutes" appropriate public space use vs food production for human consumption

Clearly the Toronto "government" had this garden removed for purely political reasons.

To

a: enforce the rule of their tyranny

b: ensure that the people get the message of remaining dependant on food banks  and handouts, etc

Clearly people have lost their "common" sense or those types of comments would not have even been made

I am going to address "satisfied" and Juan Carlo at the same time-

What were the motives of the garden??

Are you serious?

When i asked where is the common sense or critical thinking and you ask such an irrational question

Are you going to tell me that humans producing food for human consumption is anything but a basic human right? Inherent to humanity upon their birth as the very basis of human survival?

Were the "commandeering" the property?

You want to talk about emotional rhetoric and all, the use of that word "commandeering" was intended to create.

It is clear the garden grew in that area the entire growing season, attended to by the public gardeners. Why did the city wait until the harvest to take it out?

Because it is clearly waging a psychological "mind control" game against the people who grew the garden, that would be the public, on a public space.

The message is your labour was for not, the product of your labour is garbage

The disgrace of this act, and the message it sends to the people is completely lost on you.

How many food banks does Toronto have? How many people could have benefitted from this food, not just the people who would eat it, or could have eaten it. But the people who were actually engaging in a community activity for the benefit of the community at large

Juan Carlo "respect for the law" etc

Circular reasoning

The two things I take away from reading Juan Carlo and "Satisfied" is that these are two well conditioned thinkers. By that I mean your thinking skills are conditioned by the flavour of the day

Not by common sense, not by critical thinking skills by the conditioning of the Politics at hand.

If a law is bad, there is no reason to respect it.

I used the rhetorical example that if the city passed a law "you cannot have a garden" on your own property -- Juan Carlo and Satisfied would both be mimicking "well it is the law"

conditioned thinking..

I got the same sense, Juan. If they wanted to grow food for themselves or others, then why didn't they do it in a place where that could be accomplished productively? However, if they wanted to portray themselves as righteous victims of evil government by grabbing a tiger by the tail, then I'd kindly ask them NOT to do it under the guise of growing food, community gardens, organics, or the like.

There's an ancient unswerving principle that says that you know what seeds were planted by the harvest that was reaped. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of community gardens that were organized for the purpose of effectively producing food that are doing just that. This "garden" in Toronto is by far a different story.

That makes it sad, indeed. The damage these people have done to true community gardening is beyond measure. This was a group of protesters trying to make a statement, and all they did was make it ahrder for community gardens to exist.