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The last, worst G20
?It’s ironic that the controversial G8/G20 conference in Ontario this weekend, is being held as Canada Day approaches. Because it’s hard to imagine a less “Canadian” way of having all your friends over for a chat than the “police-state” approach that’s being taken in Toronto and, of all places, Huntsville. One presumes that the reason the federal government was interested in hosting this “photo-op” in the first place, was to give the world’s leaders a glimpse of the scenic splendour of Muskoka, followed by the ethnic vibrancy of Toronto. In their zeal to protect their charges from the slightest breath of trouble, the security forces are denying them any flavour of anything Canadian. They might as well be on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic (Harry Stemp’s suggestion), or on a drilling platform (where Ted Barris would put them), for all the Canadian experience they’ll get while here.
Among the alternatives being belatedly touted in the media are any one of a score of Canadian universities, where the residences are empty in the summer and there are an abundance of meeting rooms of all sizes. But the idea we liked best was laying in the turf at the Rogers Centre or the Saddledome or some other enclosed stadium, putting everbody up in tents, and doing the talking around a giant campfire. Now that’s Canadian. The artificial lake would make some sense in that context. A G20 summer camp, complete with roasting marshmallows and a campfire singalong - “Kumbaya” has a pretty international flavour, don’t you think?
All this jaunty banter, of course, disguises the possibility that in its farcical, fascistic over-reaction to hosting the summit, the Harper government may have done the whole world a very expensive favour. It may have caused the governments of the G8 to rethink the very concept of a summit, and to put an end to them in their present form.
It’s pretty well accepted that nothing substantive really happens at these summits, anyway. All the agreements, to the extent that they mean anything in the long run, are worked out well in advance, to some small degree through bi-lateral meetings (or in sessions at the various United Nations venues throughout the world), or overwhelmingly through tele-conferencing or other electronic communication.
Face-to-face meetings are jazzy, but as we’ve seen, they’re outlandishly expensive, gobbling up resources that the non-G8 members of the G20, not to mention the other 180 nations of the world, would happily accept to help resolve some of the very real problems back home. Is Mr. Harper so blind that he can’t see the obscene cruelty of spending a billion dollars on security for leaders who can’t keep their populations fed or housed? Unbelievable.
So in the coming years, observers may point to the Ontario summits as a turning point, where world leaders, shocked at the bottom line, decided to take a much more practical, constructive way of reaching joint decisions, an approach more in keeping not only with a broadening social conscience, but with a twenty-first century style of communicating and reaching consensus. Being known for pointing the wrong way is better than being ignored, eh?
