Overkill at the G20

Downtown Toronto was turned into a fortress for the sake of less than 100 troublemakers among the protesters.

Two days after the conclusion of the G20 summit in Toronto, an eerie appearance of normalcy has returned to the city’s downtown core. But it will be quite a while before Torontonians can digest – much less forgive – the damage that has been inflicted by the summit’s organizers on their city and their civic pride.

By the standards of similar economic summits held in other places over the past decade – Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa, London – the Toronto protests were peaceful. Altercations were rare, no one was seriously hurt, and there were no more than a few instances of vandalism. Only a handful of shop windows, notably a Starbucks and a Nike store, and a few bank windows were smashed.

The total number of protesters, scattered across the city of 2.5 million, has been estimated at less than 10,000, the vast majority of whom were entirely peaceful. By the police’s own admission, the troublemakers with a violent streak numbered less than 100 people.

In stark contrast, the number of police and special security forces mobilized by the government to protect the summit’s ground zero was over 20,000 – two for every protester! With such an advantage in numbers, and being so heavily armed and backed up by advanced intelligence on the protesters, security forces could have been expected to keep order, while making citizens and business owners feel safe.

They did nothing of the sort. Instead, almost entirely by design, they turned downtown Toronto into a fortress.

The fortified barricades erected in the central business district seemed designed to forestall a foreign army’s invasion or suicide bombers, not small pockets of disaffected anarchists and anti-globalization activists brandishing rocks and golf balls. In the weeks leading up to the summit, security cameras were placed on almost every pole in Toronto’s core. Since such massive surveillance has failed so far in identifying the vandals, we could be forgiven for asking what the cameras were good for other than instilling fear?

In the days before the summit, as if on cue, the news media announced that the government had authorized the use of “sound cannons” which could cause permanent hearing damage. In the same spirit of projecting fear and alarm, the government unexpectedly announced that a “Public Works Protection Act” had suddenly been passed, giving security forces unprecedented search and seizure rights normally associated with police states.

During the days-long ordeal, large sections of the city were entirely deserted by residents, a sign of the successful fear mongering by those who were sent to make us feel safer.

The heavy-handed tactics of security forces led to over 800 arrests, a first-ever use of tear gas in Toronto, and a de facto declaration of marshal law in a city known for its politeness and civility. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders on Canadian soil is thus likely to be remembered not as a sign of our elated place on the global stage, but for the paranoid and militaristic worldview and undemocratic outlook of the summit’s organizers – ie: the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

Like the residents of Toronto’s downtown, the world leaders and thousands of elite delegates meeting at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre were trapped by the security perimeter surrounding them. For the thousands who had come to Toronto for the first time, the martial procedures forbade any form of interaction with the city, its landmarks, and its people. Their memories of Toronto are likely to be those of being holed up – ostensibly by the threat posed by a few dozen “thugs,” as Harper called the vandals among the protesters.

The 2,000 or so international journalists who descended on Toronto to cover the summit didn’t fare much better. They were kept inside the Canadian National Exhibition’s grandly designed Direct Energy Centre. It, too, was fortified with barricades. Ostensibly to protect international journalists, special police with guns were everywhere – not just at the entrance to the centre, but inside as well – protecting the journalists from each other and from radicals who might have snuck in, despite extensive screening, the passes to be worn at all times, and a long accreditation process. A more discreet security presence could have certainly been arranged for journalists, Instead, they were treated to the same sense of siege that pervaded the rest of the city.

The Canadian public was shocked to find that their government would be spending over $1 billion just on summit security. During his press conference in Toronto, French President Nicolas Sarkozy poked a hole in the Harper government’s “value for money” pretensions by claiming that, as the host of upcoming G8 and G20 summits next year, France will spend only one-tenth the amount Canadians did.

The hallmark of successful security work is to enable citizens to carry on their lives with minimal disruption, while allowing visiting dignitaries to catch a glimpse of the people and landmarks of the city they are visiting. By such yardsticks, the G20 summit in Toronto was handled with a heavy hand and, as far as Torontonians are concerned, a heavy heart.

In the upcoming weeks and months, Canadians, especially the hundreds who were arrested, will be asking their government about why their largest city was turned into a prison and they into prisoners. They will ask the Harper government for a breakdown of costs and for redress – above and beyond the $1 billion already spent.

And what about the substance of the summit? Stay tuned.

This is the first part of a two part series on the Toronto G20 summit by Alidad Mafinezam. You can read the second part here.