These are a few of my scattered reflections on the G20 Summit in Toronto:
- The role of the police in a democratic society is to provide for the security and safety of the people. And, I would be the first admit that this is a very challenging, and at times, thankless job. Yet, with over $930 million spent on security and the deployment of nearly 15,000 police officers (at a cost of over $122 million) the Toronto Police Service demonstrated how inept it was at keeping the peace and how brutally effective it was at violating the rights and freedoms of peaceful protesters, ordinary citizens, and members of the media.
- As a result, there ought to be an independent public investigation into how this summit was policed and Toronto Chief of Police Bill Blair ought to be held to account for every strategic and tactical decision that was made over the weekend. If policing decisions were being dictated by political pressure, this ought to be brought out for public scrutiny too.
- The secret passage of Ontario Regulation 233/10 through the Ontario legislature, a bill that gave police the power to arbitrarily search and detain anyone within 5m of the security fence, is a low water mark for civil liberties, not experienced since Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis. Not only does this regulation likely violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, but unlike the War Measures Act, the public were given no warning of this sweeping extension of police powers. Hopefully, there will be successful constitutional challenges to this regulation. Moreover, there ought to be an independent inquiry into how this amendment was passed and at whose bequest.
- These summits and the protests that surround them have moved from providing a forum for political expression into a spectacle divested of much of its political content and subversive potential. Events are not of themselves; events are that which can be narrated from within a particular interpretive framework that is understood to constitute common-sense. Keeping aside the allegations surrounding the use of agent provocateurs, it is important for protestors not to rise to the bait because the dominant iterative is predisposed against them. Acts of petty vandalism are not going to raise consciousness or foment revolutionary fervor given the dominant interpretative framework of the contemporary media. Similarly, if you think that smashing the window of an independent mom and pop store is striking a blow at global capitalism, you really are delusional.
- Finally to appreciate what transpired in Toronto over the weekend, you have to understand the Machiavellian darkness that envelopes Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He dislikes Toronto immensely, not just because he has adopted the anti-Toronto populism of the Prairie provinces, but because Toronto represents everything that he fears: cosmopolitanism, progress, innovation, the urban, culture, and diversity. In the wake of the G20 summit he has managed to:
- bring negative global media attention to the city;
- impose significant financial burdens on the city due to the de facto closure of the downtown core, clean-up costs, and loss of future revenues to industries like tourism because of the negative coverage;
- convince the provincial government (which is Liberal) to conduct the dirty work of undermining constitutional rights through the passage 233/10 leaving them to take the brunt of the political fallout;
- draw attention and criticism away from the ideological position on budget deficits held by himself, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel that will likely plunge the global economy into another recession;
- unite other parts of Canada in a mutual feeling of schadenfreude over what has happened to Toronto.
Therefore, using the events surrounding the summit as a catalyst, I fully expect that the Conservative party will try to leverage anti-Toronto sentiment--which has a long provenance in Canada--into more substantive political support going into the next federal election.
Update: For on-going in-depth coverage of the G20 and its aftermath, check out the following links:
Stencil and photo credit: Posterchild


