G20

With the insanity that was G20 a month behind us, and most of the dirt on the subject brought to the surface i felt it was time to reflect on the matter. Almost every single thing to do with G20 seemed fucked up and pre destined to be a giant disaster. from the moment Harper made the decision to host the event in Canada’s largest city, smack dab in the heart of the financial core. Harper did this despite objections form every official at the City of Toronto. From the Mayor to the Chief of Police and the heads of the TTC, the conscious was this; the G20 will mean nothing but bad things for this city, furthermore placing the event in the downtown core presents a very hard environment to keep secure.

Its although those in charge of planning this event were sitting at some long bored table in Ottawa and thought to themselves “Hey why not do everything we can to piss of Toronto” Lets accept the fact that the event was destined to be in Toronto, fine so be it but out of all the locations in this city, and all the convention centres, hotels and facility’s capable of hosting such a gathering why would you chose Metro Convention centre? In order to secure this building it required the closing of several major roads and obstructed access for countless business, even a condo. Had this event taken place on the CNE grounds setting up a perimeter logistically would have created little to no major disruption to day to day business in Canada’s financial capitol.

I remember the days leading up to that day, common conversations overheard in the city were pretty optimistic, i was fairly confident that nothing major would happen. I mean i was born and raised in Toronto, i have never witnessed in my lifetime a major riot, the best i ever saw was 10 years ago when OCAP pulled their typical anti government anti police shit on queens park. And that was a mere scuffle compered to what was about to unfold in the streets of Toronto “New York but without the crime” “New York if it were run by the Dutch” the city with many reputations but violence and civic disorder not being one of them. I had confidence in our police force and our military to ensure things would not be allowed to get out of control.

The days just before the weekend i was amazed at the show of force by our police force, and then the other police forces that followed. People were upset with the level of officers on our streets but people seemed not to realize what was coming our way, even the 60,000 officers on duty could not maintain full order when chaos erupted.

Allot of people were pissed off at the cops during G 20 but i personally think they handled themselves extremely well considering the difficulty faced. Toronto's chief of police was routinely left out of the loop about details such as the fact that the “special powers” granted to the police were in fact nothing more then legislation stating that the area within the security fence would be treated as a courthouse or other such building and that the public works act could be enforced within that area. At first the chief was told it was an area 10 meters outside the fence, the chief told the public and his officers this but this information was incorrect and the government knowing full well the public and police were under the wrong impression about the area in question did nothing to correct this misinformation instead using it as a scare tactic.

TPS (Toronto Police Services) and the ISU officers were told that their main objective was not to let one person anywhere near the security fence. Previous G 20 protests all saw the fence breached and this was not to happen this time around. When the black bloc as they are called made their first appearance splintering out of a peaceful protest there was very little the police could do. (think about a bag of marbles and the bag braking) there was no way the police could predict the path these people were going to take, and mobilizing officers to intercept these people requires some idea of where to send the officers. People failed to realize that the same moment havoc was being wrecked on Yonge St. Riots were taking place down at Queen, Richmond, and University.

People became critical of how quick police were to round up citizens, my response is simple. After the tactics of the bloc were demonstrated police knew that there was no way to Handel this with kid gloves, a group of peaceful protestors could change clothing any moment and create another fire storm. For this reason the police took no chances, and i was fine with this, if it meant not seeing building go up in flames and the entire downtown turn into a mob scene then so be it. I was at home and i made a point of not going anywhere even close to police activity because doing so is just asking for trouble. The cops don’t know who you are or what your intentions are, and this is not a normal day, they are expecting anything to happen so you may be minding your own business but the guy next to you looks that way except for the weapons concealed under his clothing. The cops were doing a job, and in allot of cases a very unpleasant one. Allot of officers worked 16 hours none stop that weekend, wearing body armour in 30C temps, allot of the officers in riot gear were regular officers who normally never have to step into riot gear.

Granted there were cases of police brutality and excessive use of force and this is never acceptable, also not acceptable were the conditions to which detainees were held. But we are human, and bullying is common among people who posses the upper hand, in this case 60 000 officers many of whom would never set foot in this city again had control over the people and they abused their powers which is appalling and should be dealt with in the form of termination.

In closing things could have been much much worse, but thanks to the police and their actions damage was minimal compared with other cities after G20. Truth be told events such as this one should not be held in major urban settings, this is just asking for trouble a city of 2.5 million can mobilize fairly fast, a town of 15 000 probably just wants you our and could care less then to protest.  

Transit

     Elections as always so entertaining, its the one and only time politicians act like they are one of us. “citizens” its the one time that you will see a Prime Minister, Premiere or Mayor pretend to “connect” with the electing public. But after they have won they move into another realm, and that feeling as though politicians might actually relate to normal citizens vanish.

Looking back in history the people who lead us and achieved great things and produced results which over the long term benefited most of the people who put that person in power. These men and woman were always controversial, they almost always had a personal ambition to accomplish something and they would push for their beliefs even if it rubbed some other leaders or CEO's the wrong way. It was thinking like that which built the railway across Canada, saw a universal healthcare system built, built subways, and created the regional transit service known as GO. All the things i listed were not always popular, the idea of spending billions to lay a network of commuter rail lines across the GTA was seen as a wast of money, many thought that money would be better spent expanding our highways. And had the money been spent doing that very thing it would have been very popular with the public since construction of highways tend to move allot faster with results seen allot sooner then transit building.

But the premier knew that unless such a service was built future commuters would suffer due to a lack of public transit options. Sadly it seems like it has become more important to passiveie the public whom become enraged at the meer idea of taxes let alone increased taxes, that investment and expantion of our transit systems has been at a more or less halt for the past 20 years. And over that 20 years Toronto's population has gone up by over a million, and after amalgamation Toronto now had several new jurisdictions it was solely responsible for. Before 1998 If North York had poor public transit it was more seen as north york short coming but now the only body responsible is Toronto.

But even with the downloading of 5 municipality’s and an ever booming population Toronto saw no major expansion of subways or LRT construction, in fact the TTC provided less service overall in the 90's due to lack of funding. Plans were made but due to the short sighted actions of a Conservative government at the time plans to build a subway line along Eglinton ave. Were cancelled by queens park. The line itself had barely been dug out and had to be filled back in upon its termination. Toronto's next chance at some transit construction came in the form of then North York motivated Sheppard subway, which had this line been completed to its original plan would have been quite beneficial to Toronto and taken allot of the demand off the now over capacity Yonge line. Sheppard’ss original path was to start at Downsview station east to Finch following it s current path but past where it ends today tofinallyy terminate at theScarboroughh RT. This layout would have allowed people in the city’sss north end a rapid way downtown, it would have given aalternativeee tusing the yonge line and it would give people in Scarboroughh an alternative to getting downtown from the Bloor Danforth line. But in another shortsighted move of stupidity funding was slashed to the line and it was ordered to be cut back to what we see today. So my question is this, have the days of true political will and ambition passed us by? Have we become so cash strapped that massive capital projects are just not possible? Or are leaders to chicken shit of voter backlash from raised taxes and new revenue sources to fun a massive expansion of transit in the GTA. Because if we don’t act soon and put public transit ahead of the personal car we will be a victim of our own success, commercial transportation is held up in traffic delaying goods and stalling the economy, this while car after car sit idling on the 401 16 lanes wide with one person per car, as they sit there a commuter train passes an overpass moving at 100kph carrying 1500 passengers, and then a subway train emerges form the tunnel into open air carrying 1000 passenger and moving at 80kph, Now why are we still using cars?