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rfmcdonaldYesterday, the local newspapers featured two news items about next month's G20 summit pretty prominently: the Toronto Star observed that Toronto police have bought sound cannons to use against potential rioters, while the National Post lets us know that the federal government is not going to compensate Toronto businesses for any damage during the summit. There have been any number of other stories of late, like the news that the estimated security costs have ballooned to one billion Canadian dollars and will probably keep on rising, or that graffiti and vandalism has started already , with one group that firebombed an Ottawa bank promising to be here in Toronto. Torontoist, in the meantime, maps out the areas of Toronto to be overwhelmed by the summit, showing that basically the entire downtown is going to be downtown, implying that the whole city is going to be wrecked.
What did Toronto do to deserve these horrors? Is Stephen Harper trying to get back at Toronto for not voting in enough Conservative MPs? The whole affair isn't going to have anything like the ambiguously positive spinoff effects that (say) a major sporting event might have, and the understandable and necessary security arrangements for the summer are going to wreck life in Toronto for a good chunk of the summer. Why hold these kinds of summits in metropoli?
What did Toronto do to deserve these horrors? Is Stephen Harper trying to get back at Toronto for not voting in enough Conservative MPs? The whole affair isn't going to have anything like the ambiguously positive spinoff effects that (say) a major sporting event might have, and the understandable and necessary security arrangements for the summer are going to wreck life in Toronto for a good chunk of the summer. Why hold these kinds of summits in metropoli?
