G20 and G-whiz in Toronto

  Following the last weekend of June, when G-20 leaders conferred in Toronto, I was keenly coursing the news for any positive accomplishments of the G-20 gang and accompanying Toronto street conflicts between police and demonstrating crowds promoting various social and political causes because I had learned little meandering that Sunday afternoon around the sites of both events.

   Each of the half-dozen cops I queried among the dozens assembled at all main intersections I encountered had nothing to offer -- "I'm from out of town" or "I'm from Ottawa" was mostly what I got.

   Even the interruption of my frustrated return home late  Sunday afternoon provided next to nothing.

   My homeward trip, aboard a Spadina streetcar northward bound from the lakefront, came to a halt at Queen Street -- because of an array of police preventing the southward advance of a hundred-or-so civilians.

  Some of the civilians were shouting something I couldn't understand. A few waved signs preaching "Peace," or else, curled up by breeze, messages were hidden. Every move I made prompted a police person to tell me to move away, albeit neither northward nor eastward.

  (None asked me to unzip my bombless handbag--something a woman cop at Union Station had earlier demanded, thereby discovering my rain jacket, folded umbrella, camera and a copy of the New Yorker magazine. She lightened up a bit when I remarked, “Darnit! I forgot to pack my bomb!”)

  Anyway, I walked westerly for five blocks -- warning eastwardly bound pedestrians en route that Spadina was shut. During that walk, I saw three 10-cop squads racing aboard bicycles towards the Spadina fuss, each platoon beeping siren-like horns as they blasted dangerously through intersection stop signs and signals.

  When I reached Bathurst street to catch a streetcar home, guess what? The first streetcar to stop was a diverted Spadina vehicle on a route that would not get me home. . . .

  Speaking above of the New Yorker, our Monday New York Times reports--by Canadian correspondent and former Macleansian Ian Austen--that among a few journalists amid the hundreds of people arrested by police during the weekend was Steven Paikin, host of the TV Ontario program Agenda.

  Speaking once more of the New Yorker, I have just received coincidentally a weekly email from that magazine. But I find nothing in its contents of the July 5 issue to satisfy my search for reports of any accomplishments by the international G-20 and combative police force actions in Canada.

The New Yorker's lack of reporting the G-hassle in Canada is particularly ironic because only a week earlier that magazine had been enriched by thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars from Canada.

Its June 28 issue carries advertisements from Canadian federal, provincial and municipal governments, plus a few Canadian businesses -- 22 ads in all, 15 of them costly, full-page Canada-promotions in that 80-page mag.

Odd, eh?   --cm 28-6-10

   P.S. On Saturday, July 10, calling it a Day of Action for Civil Liberties, about 1,200 people marched around  downtown Toronto denouncing how police and governments handled the G-20 summit and its aftermath. During that demo, the group held a brief sit-in at the intersection of Queen and Spadina streets, site of the June 27 demonstration when protestors and some passersby were  “kettled”--held for hours by police squads both behind as well as in front of that group--during a driving rainstorm. #

Picture Credit: Carl Mollins