In the early hours of September 17th, 2018, the members of provincial parliament at the legislative assembly of Ontario were up long past their bedtimes. I was, too; my friend James and I found ourselves in the Members’ Gallery at Queen’s Park, watching first-hand what turned out to be the wildest night in the recent history of Ontario politics. At the time, it felt dreamlike and surreal – we were there with our shorts and t-shirts, next to members of parliament dressed in their Monday-morning best, and witnessing the drama unfold.

The legislative slumber party was the culmination of a chain of political events that started back in July, when Premier Doug Ford announced that he would cut Toronto’s city council in half. Most city councillors were not happy about this. In August, they voted 27 to 15 to pursue legal action with the hope of stopping the Premier’s plan. This worked – on September 10th, a justice on the Ontario Superior Court ruled that Ford’s plan violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Upon this ruling, Ford’s counterplay was to use the very same Charter to override the court’s decision. He declared he would use the “notwithstanding clause,” a feature of the Charter never before used in Ontario, to strike down the ruling and proceed with his original plan.

A September poll found that 65 percent of Toronto residents opposed Ford’s invocation of the clause. The Progressive Conservative party wanted to pass legislation to invoke the clause quickly, but in the coming week, members of parliament were scheduled to take time off to attend a plowing match in Chatham-Kent. To try and pass their legislation as soon as possible, the government scheduled an emergency reading for their bill to begin at 12:01am on September 17th.

For James and I, the night (which ended surrounded in equal parts by boisterous protests and tedious speeches) began in our living room, where we decided on a whim that we would bike over to Queen’s Park to see what all the hype was about. When we arrived at the front lawn of the legislative assembly, we saw a long line of people waiting for a spot in the public gallery. Everyone to whom we talked said that they had come in opposition to the government’s use of the notwithstanding clause, and wanted to show up to make this opposition visible to Doug Ford and the Conservatives. This was certainly the hype we were looking for, but the turnout also meant that we were surely too late to secure ourselves seats in the public gallery.

We were correct about this last point – I later followed up with some friends waiting in that line who stood outside for hours without being admitted into the public gallery. Just before we gave up hope, we were whisked into a separate line by a friend of James’: a New Democratic Party (NDP) staffer who had special passes for admittance to the private members’ gallery. Within a few minutes, we were inside, and we made it into the legislature’s main chambers just in time for the reading to begin.

My first thought upon entering the chambers was that we were only a few feet away from the semi-famous members of parliament who actually make our provincial laws. My second thought was that none of them looked at all tired – everyone seemed ready for what was about to take place. When we took our seats in the members’ gallery, a young legislative usher reminded us that no one in the galleries would be permitted to speak, applaud, or make visible gestures.

Those rules didn’t last long. Five minutes into the opening speech given by the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, ex-NDP member of parliament Rev. Cheri DiNovo took a seat next to us in the gallery and began to loudly raise her concerns with the government. “You do not need to vote with him!” we heard her yell to the MPPs. “This is a sad, sad day for Ontario,” she said, as the legislative usher performed her titular duty.

DiNovo was taken out quickly. James and I exchanged wide-eyed glances about her quick departure, and for a moment it seemed as though the minister’s speech would continue without interruption. It was then that the doors to the public gallery were opened, and the people from the front of the line whom we had seen outside started shuffling in. DiNovo had broken the ambient silence which surrounded the minister’s voice, but now it disappeared completely. We could hear faint murmurs from the public gallery in response to the minister’s defense of Ford, and these murmurs quickly grew to howls of protest.

Members of the public chanted “shame!” as they were ushered out. Some were arrested and handcuffed when they refused to leave. “I am a city council candidate!” one man yelled, leaning over the banister separating the public gallery from the bowels of the legislature. He proceeded to point directly at Ford, swearing at him and calling him by name. Ford met his eyes with a sneer for a moment, then chuckled with his fellow Conservatives. It seemed like the confidence of the crowd grew as time went by. The crowd’s passionate and often scathing shouting grew for many minutes, until the Speaker of the House ordered: “Clear the galleries!” At this point, everyone who remained in the public galleries was removed. James and I were in the private gallery, though – we got to stay.

We stayed there, taking in what had happened in the public galleries and what continued to happen on the house floor. The reading went on: it was much less interesting now that it wasn’t being interrupted by the defiant rebukes of the public. At about 2:00 am, we decided to call it a night, and give up our precious seats in the members’ gallery. “I haven’t seen anything like this since I’ve worked here,” said a security guard in passing as we left the main chambers. As we were leaving, we could hear rumbling from inside the house, and thundering shouts coming from outside. When we left the building, we saw people lying down and pounding their feet against the walls from the outside. “Whose house?” someone screamed; “Our house!” was the resounding reply.

Apparently, the reading went on until the next morning, with the protests slowly dying out with the night. James and I biked back home, talking incessantly about the night’s events, trying to capture in words the feverish excitement we had felt in the room – the fervent and unrelenting energy that emanated from those who had shown up to protest the bill. We concluded that there was something about the circumstances that made September 17th special: I wasn’t sure if it was the time of night, the fierce contrast between the formalities of House decorum and the protests, or the fact that we were two of the handful of people who got to witness all of this happen as outsiders, but something made that night feel like the important culmination of Toronto’s opposition to the fate of its council.

Two days later, a three-judge panel on the Ontario Court of Appeals overruled the Superior Court’s decision, effectively making Ford’s pursuance of the notwithstanding clause unnecessary. The ruling was made on a Wednesday morning at 10:00 am.