Colin Horgan guardian.co.uk,
Monday 28 June 2010 17.30 BST
Police at the G20 throw a protester to the ground as they make an arrest.
Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA
As last week's G8 and G20 summits approached, most of the domestic discussion surrounding them centered on costs. A marketing pavilion that was set up in the international broadcast centre designed to promote Ontario's Muskoka region, (the picturesque lake district that hosted the G8 leaders), was the most popular target for public and political scrutiny early on. The pavilion featured two walls of canoes surrounding a wooden dock and an artificial miniature lake. At a cost of $57,000, what became dubbed as the "fake lake" was a particularly easy target to exemplify what many believed to be an overall outrageously overpriced summit. But it was the security tab, ringing in at roughly $930m (CAD) that drew the most ire. Now, after a weekend that saw downtown Toronto in a state of chaos, that number is put into new perspective. What did we pay for, exactly?
During a press conference at the closing of the G20 meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Harper deplored Saturday's scenes of vandalism and violence, citing them as justification for the security costs. In so doing, he echoed the line trumpeted by his government for the last month – a month where the Conservatives tried to defend their summit spending and deflect attention away from PR nightmares like the "fake lake". Arguably, in retrospect, Harper's words now seem to make sense. One only had to turn on the television to see the endless, breathless coverage of the police cars ablaze in Toronto's financial district; the storefront vandalism; or the snatch squads in Queen's Park breaking rank and apprehending demonstrators in quick precision movements to see what he was talking about. The heavy security was, according to Harper, completely warranted.
Others might have a different opinion. Just as the G8 summit got underway last week, it was revealed that the Province of Ontario had quietly passed a controversial piece of legislation under the Public Works Protection Act. The law allowed a member of the Integrated Security Unit to arrest anyone who came within five metres of the G20 security zone who refused to either identify themselves, or allow a search of their possessions. The legislation was not debated in the provincial legislature, and though it is only temporary (it expires the day after the summit ends), it won't even be officially published until 3 July. According to some activists, this was all the evidence anyone needed to show that the government(s) had gone too far, and that the G20 served as a way to justify the strangling of civil liberties. And, arguably, that also seems to make sense.
Thus, the pre-summit rhetoric from either side served as a kind of opening bell for the ensuing fight between protesters and police, and it looked (as it always does) as though we might witness a victor; a decision, once and for all, on the true state of democracy in Canada.
But that battle – if it was one – predictably ended exactly as it should have, with both the government and protesters getting what they wanted: justification for their grievances, and not a lot more.
In his comments on Sunday, Harper was also speaking to the bizarre circularity of the images from the streets of Toronto. That is, he inadvertently acknowledged the frustrating relationship between the police and the demonstrators: that, effectively, they exist now virtually only to justify each other's presence.
So, back to that question of what Canadians actually paid for. In this regard, what part of the weekend was a success? Was the Integrated Security Unit successful? Six hundred arrests might lead us to believe they were, but three burned-out police cars might tell us different. In the end, the ISU was as successful as it needed to be: the security zone remained secure, and everything else was gravy, as it all served only to reinforce their presence in the first place.
Were the protesters and anarchists successful? Again: only as much as they needed to be. They, too, played their role perfectly, providing the world with the kind of images we've come to expect, while ensuring that they were completely devoid of any meaning. In the process they got to justify their actions by complying with a familiar narrative wherein they became as much a part of the system that they wished to destroy as the leaders they railed against.
So, what did Canada get for $930m? We got a gallery of stock photos – representations of western democracy in action, and completely replaceable by any number of virtually identical others gathered in the last decade. In effect: nothing.
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