The yellow line on this picture is a “3m-high (10ft), 3.5km (2.2-mile) concrete and metal fence” in downtown Toronto. The walled-off area includes Union Station, the main commuter rail hub for downtown, as well as the CN tower. A number of shops have been boarded up for a security effort that’s going to cost $1.1 billion.
Add the PITA factor of big protests to that number, and remind me why would any city want to host a G20 meeting?
fucen tarmal
having lived through this mess, because you hate poor people in your downtown area, you wish to license your police to take free shots at citizens and college students, as well as payoff a decade worth of “retribution”, you love the sound of noise-cannons in the morning….like anything else, if you live an everyday life you kind of get screwed(but i am a curmudgeonly sort who hates the comparatively infinitesimal arts festival in my hood for the disruption to routine for sub-etsy level tchotchkes sold at top dollar and the people it attracts)
actually for a city like ours most people know nothing about, there are some benefits, the question is why a known commodity like toronto would want it?
befuggled
Tell me about it. I live a few blocks north of the G20 zone, and a few blocks south of the official protest zone. On the bright (?) side, there are dozens of cops within shouting distance.
It could be worse. I know some people who live in condos inside the security zone, and they’ll have to go through an incredible hassle if they want to go in or out of their building.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
toujoursdan
My sister works in downtown Toronto at one of the big banks and they have essentially closed everything for the duration and given everyone time off. She’s lucky because it’s a paid holiday for her, but there are many hourly workers who are going to struggle through this meeting.
canuckistani
I work just outside the zone, and it is a giant PITA. On the bright side, I’m pretty sure my bike won’t get stolen with 20 cops standing outside my building.
Putting the G20 in the downtown core of a major city is just spite on the part of PM Harper, probably because Toronto consistently votes liberal.
Nylund
As if the Roger’s Centre and the CN Tower didn’t already look enough like a man’s sack and shaft, now they gotta build it a cockring too?
On the bright side, at least they’re protecting the Steam Whistle Brewery.
canuckistani
@Nylund:
Have you stopped to consider that while terrorists can’t get in, beer can’t get out?
befuggled
They’ve managed to scare everybody away from downtown. My wife says traffic has supposedly been pretty decent this week. The Gardiner was empty Wednesday during rush hour heading out of downtown, instead of hideously backed up like it usually is.
Steam Whistle is unfortunately boring. Their spiel is that they make one beer and they make it well. I have one occasionally at a restaurant if they don’t have anything more interesting.
geg6
When they had it here last year, most downtown businesses just closed, keeping their employees home. The protesters, despite my sympathy for their causes, got a taste of what every other protesters in the US or at any other G20 got for their pains. The only people I felt sorry for were the people who actually live downtown.
There were certainly benefits to a city like Pittsburgh in hosting a G20. Visibility and marketing potential for the city and it’s amenities, a showcase for our business community and research universities, and an opportunity to be an example to other medium sized cities in the Rustbelt are all good reasons to host this meeting.
I’m not sure why a larger city or one with a more established and positive image would want to host, but I would venture that it was, overall, probably more of a long term plus than a minus for the Burgh.
Mudge
And the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, originally scheduled to play this weekend in Rogers Centre to cheering Toronto fans, have been exiled to Philadelphia.
Persia
@fucen tarmal: I have friends who live in Toronto and they are pissed as hell. From their POV it’s something the provincial government (IIRC) is shoving down their throats.
EDIT: Canuckistani clarifies that this is Harper’s bright idea.
Comrade Mary
DON’T GET ME STARTED. DON’T GET ME FUCKING STARTED.
Oh, well, I’ve started.
Oh, HAHAHAHAHA! Honey, nobody here asked for this fucking thing. NOBODY. But once Harper decided, there wasn’t a lot we could do, as we’d be facing the equivalent of a horse’s head in our municipal bed.
Harper HATES Toronto and he doesn’t give a good goddamn about what’s being done to this city as long as he gets to preen and have his photo op (while making sure that he panders to our religious right by asking for funding for third world women and children — yay! — while not permitting Canadian funds to be used for abortions.)
I’m going down tomorrow to look at security theatre and try to run some errands at MEC. I think I’ll leave my bicycle helmet on, just in case.
For your perusal: the fake Muskoka lake for press. I shit you not.
2 million for the lake, over 1 BILLION for security. And this city is starved for money, needs paved roads, needs money for transit — and we get to be Harper’s monkey, waiting, waiting for a few coins to dribble from his meaty hands.
Why yes, I do have an opinion on this.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@Comrade Mary:
The lake cost 50k, not two million as was originally reported.
mitch
Actually, Union Station is incorrectly labeled. It’s actually the building to the right of the train tracks currently being pointed to (outside the security fence). The BBC link you provided has the correct labeling. I need to pass through Union Station later today, which should be a lot of fun…
PurpleGirl
Upon reading this post and the comments so far, I went over to see if the Yarn Harlot had written anything about the G20 security measures. (For those of you who don’t know the site, it’s the blog of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, a knitter and writer who lives in Toronto.) She complained about it taking 4 hours to drive somewhere because the subway was shut down. However, she says because she was “driving” for 4 hours, she was able to knit while driving and she finished a project.
Comrade Mary
@Mr. Poppinfresh: The whole tourism pavilion, including the lake, is 1.9 million.
And this is a press shack that will be torn down after three days. No, it is not a fabulous marketing opportunity for the money spent.
There’s a limited amount of international press coverage of this summit. How much time will reporters actually spend extolling the commercial opportunities in Canada versus the meeting results and the protests? There’s football to watch!
PurpleGirl
I feel sorry for the natives of cities that get stuck with these meetings. When NYC had its most recent large political conventions, they were restricting access around Penn Station and my office had to make up ID cards for everyone because we had a few people who used Penn Station and needed to be able to walk there to get a train. And I’ve had to find ways to get around certain blocks when the UN has its yearly opening meetings. A major PITA. I also object to the extra money these things cost the cities… I don’t believe they get back anywhere near the expenses from the attendees or that there is a tourism/PR effect.
uncle rameau
And I got a three day furlough because Rogers can’t get their downotwn Toronto employees in to work to answer calls from their customers. Contractors like me all across the country shut down with 4 days notice.
Just like the Olympics, there needs to be a permanent venue.
Seanly
Was the Legion of Doom’s Hall of Doom not available? Most of the G20 ministers work there already.
Dave Ruddell
Gotta say, while I’m pissed that this thing is costing so damned much, there’s been almost no affect to my day, and I live and work downtown (but far enough away from the security zone). About the only thing I’ve really noticed is the lack of garbage cans and newspaper boxes, which have all been removed for the duration.
Now, OTOH, shit like this makes me see red.
Comrade Mary
@Dave Ruddell: Yeah, Bill Blair was trying to bullshit people on on NewsTalk this morning, saying there was plenty of notice given on some government web site most people don’t consult.
polyorchnid octopunch
I work for a major ISP in Canada. We have our main stuff in a data centre in the middle of that mess. If we have a hardware failure during the G20, we’ll be so fucked.
Pardon the language, but imho it’s insane.
The billion dollars for security is the really big deal. Personally, I’m thinking it’s to militarize our police (which is something Canadians Do Not Want) and to turn downtown T.dot into a fully Orwelled zone, like London, England is now.
The Other Chuck
@uncle rameau:
Might I suggest a maximum security prison?
Seriously though, the mask is really coming off the faces of these tyrants. I can’t ask “what’s next” anymore because I honestly can’t think of how more brutally they can impose themselves, other than maybe dropping high explosives into the crowds.
OriGuy
I see that people are comparing it to the Field of Cloth of Gold. In 1520, Henry VIII met Francis I of France near Calais. Each king spent a fortune trying to out do the other in ostentation. It didn’t result in anything lasting, though.
fucen tarmal
@Persia:
i can relate to being pissed. believe me, when “g20” became the catch-all like “in this economy…” locally for all sorts of things, it became a bit of a joke. what amused me, is how tame the protests were, and how many of the broken windows may or may not have been an excuse to play with the toys….the folks who really got the brunt of it were the u of pittsburgh students, they were treated like protestors because protestors “might” hide among them….
this on the heels of pitt students somewhat flaunting local law enforcement at least in the very near environs of campus, when the steelers won the super bowls and to some degree when the pens won the cup a few months earlier, it was the pitt students who were out in the streets with the high profile revelry….
so the cops got theirs.
Kevin
I’ve gotten 3 days off work because of the G20…so I can’t complain.
But I was downtown Wednesday night, and the highway was empty, the streets were empty, and the normally busy downtown bars were empty. Can’t be good for the local economy.
Dave Ruddell
Comrade Mary, up to this point I kinda liked Bill Blair; more to the point, he hadn’t done anything that I thought of as really stupid, unlike some of his predecessors. Now though, to hell with him.
Splitting Image
@fucen tarmal:
Actually, one of the worst things about Toronto is that you’d be hard pressed to convince a lot of people here that the place is a well known (and reasonably well-liked) commodity outside of Canada.
There is a contingent here that feels we have to make a pitch for every Olympics and every other big event and that it’s a horrible black eye for the city each time we don’t get it. They all go off and suck their thumbs, crying about how no one loves us and real cities like New York and London look down their noses at us.
Mind you, as some others have said, this particular event was more Stephen Harper’s idea. He gets to grandstand and stick it to Toronto at the same time. Win-win situation.
befuggled
There ain’t gonna be a tourism benefit to this, trust me. I just got back from an appointment downtown on Bloor, and it is dead. There are a few people walking around, but very little traffic and a lot of cops.
There are even open parking spots on my street.
russell
The words that spring to mind are “hameau de la reine”.
Comrade Mary
@Splitting Image:
And when this happens, I start claiming I’m from Montréal again. Really, it’s paper bag over the head time, or ass-kicking time, or both, because with a paper bag over the head, you might accidentally kick some place more tender than an ass. That appeals to me.
giltay
My girlfriend works for a theatre vaguely near the fence, and they had to close their show a week early. Not so much because of security, but because everyone’s fleeing the downtown core. That and their suppliers are refusing to deliver anything this week. It’s the same with most of the theatres in Toronto.
The crazynuts thing about the security zone is that it covers the financial district. Most of the banks that Harper can point to as examples of how not to fail* have their headquarters there, and have had to close them.
So Harper’s managed to piss off everyone from the Mirvishes to the banks—I don’t think he’s going to get Toronto for a long time.
*Answer: strong regulation, which I hope sticks in Harper’s craw for all time.
furioso ateo
I was just in Toronto over the weekend for NXNE. I thought about staying for the inevitable protests, but then I remembered how much it sucks to get hit with OC Spray. Fucking, no thanks.
They were building the wall while I was there. That thing is motherfucking solid. I don’t see any protesters getting past it. And yeah, the cops were already out in packs.
Anton Sirius
I work right in the heart of what we’re now calling District 9, and have actually had to work this week… the cops and security folk I’ve seen on the streets have outnumbered everybody else about 10:1. They mostly look very, very bored.
Comrade Mary
How many cops does it take to write a jaywalking ticket?
burnspbesq
This is just the dress rehearsal for the invasion of Toronto by the American Bar Association Tax Section in September.
Ecks
@giltay:
He wasn’t getting it anyway, and he knows it. There is no cost for him to pay that he wasn’t already paying, so it’s a freebie.
That’s political machinations for you.
mightygodking
Torontoist’s coverage of the G20 is must-read. (Disclaimer: some of it is mine.)
I mean, come on, they extinguished the Eternal Flame of Hope at City Hall! That sets the irony meter off the fucking charts!
sunsin
Harper’s dead.
He’s blown over a billion dollars on something that should have cost no more than fifty million.
Good-bye to any chance he can run as a fiscal conservative ever again. Everyone hates him so much now they’re willing to overlook the fact that the opposition is devoid of leadership. And the recent British election has made his criticisms of an opposition coalition to bring him down look like stupidity. If it’s good enough for the Mother of Parliaments, it’s good enough for us.
canuckistani
Oh, nice. The bomb squad is downstairs. Hopefully they’re just stopping in at Starbucks and directing traffic away because they like their privacy.
Probably a false alarm, given the way the cops are lounging around.
canuckistani
And they’ve gone away again, hopefully because it was a false alarm and not because they’ve given up on defusing it.
ericblair
@Splitting Image:
I useta live in Toronto (around Yonge and Bloor) and got sick of this too. Toronto has to be a World! Class! City! or something bad will happen. Guess what, if you’re a World! Class! City! you don’t go around agonizing about it: you just are and occasionally get surprised that the rest of the world exists.
I’ve been away long enough that all my favorite restaurants are now laundromats. Sigh.
Comrade Mary
I used to live in London (not the World Class City, but the one two hours from Toronto). Apart from it having Marc Emery running a great used bookstore instead of selling grass, there wasn’t much that was exciting about it. But there was one laundromat that actually served pretty good food. The chili was especially nice.
fucen tarmal
@Splitting Image:
i know all too well, the inferiority complex of a local populace.
the funny one here, once the thing was announced, the politicians pivoted on “we really really want this” to “you mean we have to pay for this”? but then again our mayor was practically thrown out of the u.s. open hospitality events he wasn’t invited to, for stalking tiger woods before it became uncool.
Tim Ellis
Ugh, I have to go to Toronto this weekend for about 6 different things, one of which requires taking a GO Train out of Union Station. THAT’S gonna be fun. I hate this crap.
Luckily one of the other things is my fiancee; maybe they’ll go easier on me if I’ve got a cute, harmless looking girl with me.
And not that I get a vote in Canadian politics, but I am going to be thrilled when Harper gets the heave. If I ever move to Canada, I’m definitely going NDP.
Heck, we could use an NDP down here.