- Reaction score
- 4,266
- Points
- 1,260
This via the Toronto Star:
versus this in the St. John Telegraph-Journal:
As the City of Toronto prepares to be the host of the G8/G20 international meetings, debates have emerged about the security arrangements.
This is neither new, nor particularly Canadian. Indeed, there is much to learn from international experience in this respect and also from our own history, painfully reviewed after the 1997 APEC Conference in Vancouver, when public outcry over unnecessary and forceful arrests, pepper spray used on peaceful protesters, and Charter violations led to a full investigation and public hearing.
The lessons from both the APEC report and the more recent international reports based on Britain’s 2009 experience policing the G20 are clear: security arrangements must start from the proposition that freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful association and public demonstration are protected aspects of international gatherings, not actions that should be impeded or eliminated.
There is a duty to facilitate peaceful protest; there is no duty to make it disappear ....
versus this in the St. John Telegraph-Journal:
Like flies at a picnic, motley rabbles of radical leftist/anarchists can nowadays be counted on to swarm international summits anywhere on the globe, parroting anti-capitalist cant and acting out "revolutionary" fantasies.
As with the flies, they're more pest than threat, but a costly and annoying distraction for police. So it was at last month's G8 conference in Halifax, and will be at the forthcoming G20 leaders' summit in Toronto on June 26-27, with the 200-member Toronto Community Mobilization Network reportedly gearing up to coordinate G20 protests.
Their most egregious effect is expense to taxpayers and inconvenience to the public - Toronto's G20 requiring what's being described as Canada's biggest security operation since the Second World War, involving Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP and Canadian Armed Forces, with most of Toronto's financial district to be locked-down for two weeks behind three kilometres of fencing protecting a security zone around the Metro Convention Centre summit site.
In the 1960s, the late, great, cartoonist Al Capp created a fictitious political movement he called SWINE - Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything - for his comic strip, "L'il Abner." SWINE re-emerged in the late '90s as a loose coalition of dissident groups nominally protesting "globalization," but essentially advocating the same threadbare ideology political leftists have spouted for the last 150 years.
It's an abiding conundrum how even a small minority can still buy into Marxist dogma as a solution for anything, after socialism's demonstrably dismal record everywhere it's been tried, its failures ranging from mediocre economic anaemia at best, to depths of genocidal despotism. The strident class-warfare message remains as tediously tiresome as it was 40 years ago, and sometimes even deadly, as we saw in Athens last week ....