RBC's have unbreakable windows
Windows smashed! Police cars ablaze! Anarchists riottinig in the streets!
The visuals from the first day of the G20 conference were certainly sensational, and far be it from me to condone the acts of vandalism engaged in by the boringly predictable 'black bloc', with their desperate hatred of Starbucks and their clearly-impotent bourgeois rage. What annoys me the most, though, is that such violence is going to be used to excuse the outrageous costs of the summit's security, currently at 1.2 billion dollars and counting. Counter-intuitive thought it may seem, however, the violence in Toronto yesterday just reinforces the idea that the government spent as wastefully as it did lavishly in the run-up to this summit. The real problem with the G20 wasn't the protestors and the vandals, it was far more fundamental than that.
The real problem was holding it in downtown Toronto.
Look, when you gather up the leaders of the G20, obviously security is going to be a major issue. That being said, however, if your concern is safety over all, which appears to be the case given the twenty-thousand police in Toronto this weekend and the secret laws creating a mini-police state around the walled-off Fortress Toronto, then there's no reason whatsoever to hold your meeting in the downtown core of the largest and most densely-populated city in the entire country. If security is the paramount concern, the meeting should have been held in an undisclosed location, at some semi-isolated military base somewhere. With six months' worth of warning the government could easily have constructed enough temporary housing for the summit's visitors. And without the comfortable trappings of a major urban centre, you wouldn't see nearly so many protestors; while as many as forty-thousand protestors may have descended on Toronto yesterday, according to the Globe and Mail there was just a single protestor at the G8 meeting in Huntsville, a young child with a sign demanding more cookies for kids (his demands were quickly met by the police, by the way, before his mom picked him up and took him home again). Toronto offers the worst of all worlds as far as security is concerned, and carries with it the added bonus of inconveniencing thousands of perfectly law-abiding Toronto residents, and gutting the city's core economy for the weekend. The Blue Jays went to Philidelphia for their 'home' games, for crying out loud!
While the vandalism in Toronto yesterday was unacceptable, it doesn't justify the government's absurd spending on security. Instead, it simply reinforces what a stupid idea it was to takeover downtown Toronto for this in the first place.
The visuals from the first day of the G20 conference were certainly sensational, and far be it from me to condone the acts of vandalism engaged in by the boringly predictable 'black bloc', with their desperate hatred of Starbucks and their clearly-impotent bourgeois rage. What annoys me the most, though, is that such violence is going to be used to excuse the outrageous costs of the summit's security, currently at 1.2 billion dollars and counting. Counter-intuitive thought it may seem, however, the violence in Toronto yesterday just reinforces the idea that the government spent as wastefully as it did lavishly in the run-up to this summit. The real problem with the G20 wasn't the protestors and the vandals, it was far more fundamental than that.
The real problem was holding it in downtown Toronto.
Look, when you gather up the leaders of the G20, obviously security is going to be a major issue. That being said, however, if your concern is safety over all, which appears to be the case given the twenty-thousand police in Toronto this weekend and the secret laws creating a mini-police state around the walled-off Fortress Toronto, then there's no reason whatsoever to hold your meeting in the downtown core of the largest and most densely-populated city in the entire country. If security is the paramount concern, the meeting should have been held in an undisclosed location, at some semi-isolated military base somewhere. With six months' worth of warning the government could easily have constructed enough temporary housing for the summit's visitors. And without the comfortable trappings of a major urban centre, you wouldn't see nearly so many protestors; while as many as forty-thousand protestors may have descended on Toronto yesterday, according to the Globe and Mail there was just a single protestor at the G8 meeting in Huntsville, a young child with a sign demanding more cookies for kids (his demands were quickly met by the police, by the way, before his mom picked him up and took him home again). Toronto offers the worst of all worlds as far as security is concerned, and carries with it the added bonus of inconveniencing thousands of perfectly law-abiding Toronto residents, and gutting the city's core economy for the weekend. The Blue Jays went to Philidelphia for their 'home' games, for crying out loud!
While the vandalism in Toronto yesterday was unacceptable, it doesn't justify the government's absurd spending on security. Instead, it simply reinforces what a stupid idea it was to takeover downtown Toronto for this in the first place.