Whose decision was it to hold the G20 summit in Toronto?

[Smallc]

Actually I didnt have to. We have a national transportion system the entire purpose of which is to move large volumes of goods and people from point A to point B.

How do 20000 people get to the leafs games? Magic?

I see you still haven't thought it through.

[Molly]

I have...and there are none near where Toronto wanted the event to be held.

How many downtown hotels were inside the fence? (The Harbour Westin with its satellite fence is a pretty good hike from the convention centre- and it opnly has 1000 rooms anyway.)

By my count, it's 0.

[nicky10013]

So how would the leaders have gotten from the downtown hotels to this easier to monitor location?

They got from Pearson to downtown, which is a LONG drive with absolutely no problems. Seems like the couple blocks from their hotel to the ex couldn't have been that horrible of an option.

[JB Globe]

Thats BS and you know it, TO had all the ifra structure that was required to hold this event,

So who's dumb idea was it to hold the meeting at the Metro Convention Centre instead of Exhibition Place?

If they had changed venues they wouldn't have had to erect that fence around downtown and they could've secured the site with 1/5 of the police they ended up using. The entire reason there was no police to confront the Black Bloc morons smashing things up Yonge Street on the Saturday was because they were all securing the fence.

But nobody can take responsibilty for those punks actions excet themselfs....Harper did not pay them to damage the city.....that was a choice they made....and they should pay the cash to those store owners....

Considering that so far no one has been arrested regarding any of the vandalism, that's not gonna happen. Meaning - those store owners aren't going to get paid, unlike the store owners in Quebec City in 2001 who DID get compensated by the feds for vandalism.

[JB Globe]

What The Centre of the Universe wants, The Centre of the Universe gets. see above. How much was spent on hotels and catering and wages and booze in central Toronna last week?

And how much money was lost because scores of businesses shut down for the summit, including the major theatres in Toronto? - Mirvish lost several hundred thousand alone.

Add to that the property damage, and Toronto probably comes out in the hole on this one.

Most of the money spent was on security, and most of those providing it were police from out of town, and they were running the central command out of Barrie.

Sorry but you'll have to find something else to justify your inferiority complex about wherever you're from. And we'll go right back to not caring that folks like you have an irrational dislike of our city.

[JB Globe]

So how would the leaders have gotten from the downtown hotels to this easier to monitor location?

Like this

It's simple, really.

[Smallc]

Like this

It's simple, really.

So that whole area would have been blocked off then...brilliant.

[eyeball]

The reason that they are not at the UN is that th G-8(and now the G-20) were designed to get around UN regulations,as it relates to binding economic issues...

The only reason they hold these things behind steel walls and thousands of armed police and soldiers is to get around public concern as it relates to transparency and accountability. They should just drop the pretense and put the G-crews thousands of miles away from society out in the middle of a desert, ocean, tundra etc.

It's not like anyone is really paying a whole lot of attention to the fact they didn't do much beyond agree to disagree anyway. The whole summit thing is just a sick joke. The state's nauseating overindulgence of attention to these butt-sniffs is fifty times worse than anything we afford the IOC.

[Argus]

So that whole area would have been blocked off then...brilliant.

It wasn't the location which was the problem. It was the paranoia and security overkill from mission creep.

Let me explain how this works.

Each of the national missions is made up of a leader, a couple of senior aides, and a bunch of mandarins. Now aside from the leader, NONE of these people merit ANY protection when they're at home. And nobody tries to attack them either. Has anyone attacked the assistant deputy minister of whatever department you care to think of lately? Nope.

But during these G8/G20 meetings, the security honchos have gotten it into their heads that every single member of every delegation has to be protected against assassins - or even hooligans - or even rude people. Thus we have this humongous stupid fence covering about two hundred square blocks, and thousands and thousands of cops needed to police it, along with, no-doubt, teams of special forces covering the lobbies of every hotel housing the apparatchiks. It wouldn't do to have some protester sneaking in and spitting on the senior aide to the deputy assistant undersecretary of agriculture, now would it? It'd be a HUGE international embarrassment! The consequences are just too horrific to imagine!

In addition, the idiots in charge of security took the sort of attitude the Americans did when they conquered Iraq and couldn't figure out how to provide security. That is, they refused to scatter their men around as is normally the case, in case a huge crowd of evil protesters should surround and tear them limb from limb.

So the police went nowhere except in groups of twenty or thirty or preferably a hundred. That pretty much left the streets empty of any police presence in most locations, a perfect setup for people who just wanted to do a little vandalism. I can just hear the radios crackling now.

"There's a group of about twenty five people smashing windows on Yonge street, sir."

"Back off! I'll try and find a few hundred riot equipped officers to spring loose to assist you!"

"Uh, but I've got like, twenty cops here, sir, just on the next block. I think we can handle them."

"Negative! You don't even have riot gear! There might be hundreds more lurking in the shadows! They might throw things at you! Stand by and do nothing until I can get a few hundred cops there to assist!"

I'm sorry, but when you've got 20,000 cops and you can't utterly control every single thing that's going on in an area only about twenty five by thirty blocks, there's something wrong.