G20’s smoke obscures real issues

Neither protesters nor politicians achieved much at Toronto’s summit

Let’s get one thing straight — there was nothing earth-shattering about what happened in Toronto a little more than 10 days ago. Canada’s busiest city didn’t burn to the ground and chaos didn’t reign supreme, but that doesn’t mean Toronto’s G20 summit should be overlooked as another blip on the anarchist radar screen.

Scenes of Toronto police cars blazing in the streets of Canada’s most hectic downtown core will be the lasting images in the collective minds of all of us who witnessed the events of the G20 summit unfold on television.

Without a doubt these fiery moments, along with the destruction of businesses, clashes between protesters and the police, and alleged abuses of journalists and civilians will live in Canadians’ collective memories for some time. These memories, however, will not be this G20’s greatest legacy. That honour goes to the continuing trend of G20 summits producing little more than flimsy political promises oozing with rhetoric and light on substance.

The riots, arrests, and general appearance of chaos have been a reality at previous summits, and Toronto’s experience was no different. There is nothing genuinely unbelievable about the fact that a small group of protesters and police clashed. It made for dramatic scenes on the evening news, and I will admit that I too was glued to my television set as Peter Mansbridge told the nation about the Black Bloc protests that Torontonians won’t soon forget. But in reality, those protests simply masked the real disaster at the summit.

There’s no question that the violence and clashes between the police and protesters were very real and very dangerous. but it’s time that radical protesters like the ones in Toronto that lit those Ford bonfires realized that while their antics got international media coverage, they are as much a problem with the G20 summit and what it continues to stand for as the suits they protested against.

I’m still trying to figure out what shifting attention from real issues onto rather elementary forms of protest like smashing a window accomplished for the protesters, or how it furthered their cause in any way. If anyone saw a genuine cause being forwarded by Black Bloc protesters, please enlighten me. But from my comfy vantage point, I saw nothing more than misguided destruction.

Peaceful protesting is a fundamental right of democracy, and that is in many ways the greatest thing about the G20 — people get an opportunity to voice their displeasure with the status quo on a major stage.

Whatever their grievance — whether it be with developed nations’ stances regarding the environment, human rights, maternal health, or some other issue — I’ll be the first to applaud those that flocked to Toronto to make sure their voices were heard.

Unfortunately, no one will remember those legitimate protests, thanks to a small number of thugs who took it upon themselves to give the G20 leaders the greatest gift of all: making front page headlines, though for the wrong reasons.

The real issues, ones that should’ve dominated public discussion at a time when the most powerful leaders in the world met, ended up as little more than footnotes on the media landscape. That isn’t the fault of journalists, however — it was simply the reality of the situation. After all, the big wigs that squatted in downtown Toronto didn’t do much to warrant coverage.
While the metal fences have since come down, and Toronto has returned to a state of normalcy, the fallout from the summit continues. The review of police tactics used is just the latest part of the G20 hangover.

While the aftermath will continue, one part of the summit’s legacy has already been cemented; like its predecessors, Toronto’s G20 was once again a forum of political inaction, masked by the violence of a group of misguided delinquents.