Is There a Chiropractor in the House ? ? ? ?

This vs this.

It appears the current government's spending priorities need a fiscal adjustment . . . .

Black Bloc in Action!

Look! There's a guy in a black shirt and black hat shouting! OMG! He's asking angry questions about a large corporation! And who  knows what he has in that plastic bag or in that shoulder bag -- probably bombs! Quick, get the riot cops to the Eaton Center and start clubbing bystanders!

Over the top? Yeah. Somebody is over the top.

The connection between Stephen Harper's department and the Hitlerian security being rammed down the throats of citizens supposedly protected by a Charter of Rights for a "summit" for which the final communique has already been written is becoming very apparent.

That this whole thing has been planned for a long time, including the crushing of rights no government has the final authority to remove is finally starting to occur to people - especially those outside Toronto who are wondering why it had to be this way.

Perhaps this explains it. Harper doesn't give a red rat's ass about your rights. Everything is about him and if you rain on his tinker-toy parade, he'll punish you. He, who should be defending everything constitutional about this federation has proven, once again, that such things are mere trifles to be cast aside for his own personal aggrandizement.

This is the second Canadian city to have endured extreme and unnecessary measures in less than a year to provide empowered right-wingers, and especially Harper, with a sanitized environment in which to hold an expensive party which purposely excluded most of the population.

So ... we all called this "over the top" and the moment at which the Paul Martin campaign had jumped the shark. If it had been written by Nostradamus the superstitious would be calling it "dead on accurate". At the time, I thought it was appalling.



I no longer view it that way.

I smell a stainless steel rat

That $1.1 billion had to be going somewhere and now we know where a chunk of it is going -- to a security firm that isn't even licenced in Ontario and is offering about double the going rate for its glorified bouncers. I'm sure the firm in question - Contemporary Security Canada - has absolutely no ties to the Conservative Party of Canada and that everything was strictly on the up and up in granting them the massive contract for providing about 1,000 security screeners, many of whom were hired last month so I'm sure they will be trained to a razor's edge.

“We’ve had some intense discussions about this at APSA in the last few days,” says Ross McLeod, president of the Association of Professional Security Agencies based in Toronto. “I’ve been doing RFPs and tenders for 30 years in this business, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.”

(snip)

On May 31, Contemporary Security set up a hiring office at Humber College in Toronto and was taking applications up until today.

Contemporary held the $97-million security contract for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. On its website Contemporary says they will be "Supervised by the RCMP and Integrated Security Unit" and will be responsible for providing "airport-type pedestrian security screening, including inspection of persons and items at  the G8 and G20 sites."

According to its own website, CSC has received its licence to operate in Ontario and since I can't determine the exact publication date of the article quoted above except to narrow it down to sometime this month, I suppose it is possible CSC has been licenced in Ontario for as long a two whole weeks.

(With apologies to Slippery Jim DiGriz for this post's title) Crossposted from the Woodshed.

A modest proposal

I don't want to beat this whole "Summit costs run amok" thing into the ground (Ha! who am I kidding? This whole thing is blogging gold!) but earlier Dave expressed some concerns over the fact that the captive press corps that will be warehoused by the fake lake in some Toronto warehouse will be getting fed free beer and wine during the G8 and G20 summits. As a reporter, I can assure you it is not unusual for there to be "hospitality suites" set up at such events - though the fake lake is a new, ridiculously expensive and completely idiotic twist on the idea. And those hospitality suites are usually set up by the various marketing boards and trade promotion organizations who exist to promote Canadian products like wine, cheese, beer and other essentials.
Reporters who cover these kinds of huge events sort of expect to be fed and watered to some degree. And if you take journalists who have travelled halfway around the world to cover the summit and herd them into a warehouse 200 km from the actual event and feed them the usual pablum that come out of these kind of events, you better get them liquored up or you're going to need all that security apparatus.
Mind you, they could cancel the whole waste of time and spend all the money on beer as far I'm concerned. At $37 a case (Ontario Beer Store wholesales prices) $1.1 billion would buy 29,729,729 cases of Molson's Canadian. Given that the total population of the country is roughly 34 million give or take 500,000 or so and given that a portion of that total population are underage or abstainers or just plain don't care for beer, we could keep the beer budget to a billion dollars and give every hoser in the Great White North a 24 of chilly wobbypops and still have $100 million left over to put a back bacon sandwich on every plate for Canada Day.
I know these guys would vote for it. After all, it is a lot easier than trying to feed a baby mouse inside the beer bottle.

Boys and their toys

As mentioned below, the Canadian government is spending over a billion dollars on security for the upcoming Group of Eight and Group of Twenty summit dog-and-pony shows. This is more than five times the original estimate and dwarfs the amounts spent on similar summits in London (April 2009 $30 million) and Pittsburgh (Sept. 2009 -$18 million) both of which dealt with more protesters than can probably be expected in "Toronto the Good" 
Some of the money has gone on shiny new toys for the RCMP, OPP and Toronto Police riot squads, crowd control units and motorcade cops as well as the usual close protection bodyguard types, though naturally all the world leaders will be bringing their own sizable security details. 
About a million dollars has been spent to buy the Toronto Police four "sound notifiers" aka sonic cannons capable of producing sound pressure/ decibel levels about the same as standing behind a 747 when it revs its jets. This isn't just a loud public address system, it is a weapon that causes extreme pain and permanent hearing damage. 
Of course that leaves about another $1,099,000,000 for police y, new horses and motorcycles, riot gear, pepper spray, tasers, and lots and lots of "consulting fees" for "security experts" and plenty of contracts for private security firms. I bet this guy doesn't get any of it. 
In fact, it is so much money that they could have simply paid every man, woman and child in the entire province of Ontario about $95 just to stay home for those two weekends and still have had enough to provide a similar level of security to the Pittsburgh summit. Or they could have paid everyone in the Greater Toronto Area about $200 to spend the weekend out of town. If that seems like overkill, we could strictly limit it to Metro Toronto, give all 2.48 million residents $400 and still have more than three times as much as they spent on the London summit to buy coffee and donuts for the Toronto cops. 
In addition to the gratuitous skimming and graft bookkeeping problems, my real worry is that you can't give the boys their toys and not expect them to play with them. As we've seen numerous times since the needless pepper-spraying of demonstrators at the 1997 APEC summit to the over-reaction of police at Queen's Park in Toronto in 2000, in New York at the 2004 Republican Convention and at the Minnesota 2008 Republican Convention, if you bring in enough riot cops, you are going to have a riot. Even if the cops have to try to start it themselves.

Removing democratic rights, one summit at a time.

I agree with The Jurist. Linda McQuaig hits the nail squarely on the head.

But there are others who are so passionate about the fate of the Earth that they feel compelled to do more than shop. They want to object, to let world leaders know they disapprove. These are the types of people who plan to protest at the G20 summit later this month in Toronto.

If you're thinking they're just violent troublemakers, you've probably been listening too closely to the Harper government, which is hoping you'll succumb to its attempt to lump terrorists and peaceful protestors all together in one giant bin marked scary and anti-democratic.

One of the most difficult things to accept, as McQuaig points out, is the surrender of one of this country's leading universities to the squelch-knob twisting of the Harperites and the loss of a venue from which to challenge the so-often wrong-headed direction of establishment figures out to develop an agenda without opposition.

The University of Toronto, falling in line with this new security-state mentality, plans to lock down its main campus during the summit, forcing the cancellation of G20 related events, including one featuring Maude Barlow, Amy Goodman and Naomi Klein.

It's hard to imagine a more inappropriate response. Universities should be centres of critical thought, where students are encouraged to scrutinize the current orthodoxy and challenge the Establishment. That's hard to do when they shutter their doors at the first whiff of controversy.

You may not like protesters and you may find the anti-establishment crowd occasionally uncomfortable, but the alternative, opposition brutally silenced on the altar of "good order" (as defined by the silencers themselves) is completely unacceptable.

Now, before some semi-literate knob goes off half-cocked in the comment section, let's clear up one thing. I do not and never will support the so-called anarchists whose street antics during a protest include wanton damage to property and/or physical injury to others. Engaging in such activity is little more than gang violence and, as we have now seen demonstrated in the recent past, something readily provoked by police and government to justify the use of weapons on all forms of protest, peaceful or otherwise.

Better that the cop using the pepper spray be highlighted as having no justification for ever doing so.

McQuaig's column quite properly takes aim at the egregious rantings of Rex Murphy who, from his privileged platform, decided that a pre-emptive smear was in order.

Finally, from Seattle to Quebec City to Toronto next month, who really "owns" these summits? With the leaders invisible under their security blankets, they belong to the protestors. Summits are the high holy days, the carnival of ritual protest and vacuous street theatre. You can't hold a global anything these days, even a joyful event like the Olympics, without the tired kabuki of protest groups jamming the streets, shouting their impenetrable litany of anti-everything, accompanied, of course, by the usual band of black masked pseudo-anarchists allergic to Starbucks and thirsty for the two-day fame a little provocation or a lot of violence can bring them. The leaders own the meetings; the protestors own the cameras.

This is the same Rex Murphy who doesn't like it when he is called what he is to his face. This is the same Rex Murphy who denies global warming exists, questions science he won't or cannot understand and then tries to define himself as an educated "skeptic". Yet, without an attributable scientific fact to support his "skepticism", he protests. Protest is fine by Murphy, it would seem, as long as it suits his particular agenda done in his own particular way - electronically broadcast right across the country. Immediately followed by an injection into his bank account.

Should he be stopped? Perish the thought! Murphy, no less than any other protester, represents a point of view and it would be as damaging to democracy to silence him as it would be for a university to close their doors to a meeting which questions the actions of a government peddling right-wing ideology. And while Murphy continues to bleat unchecked, a university caves in to the jack-boot security requirements of the Harper government.

Instead of complaining about such protest one would expect the likes of Rex Murphy to stand and scream from the rooftops of the CBC and National Post that the lock-down of the U of Toronto campus to satisfy the Harper "security" demands is not only an affront to democratic freedom but extremely dangerous. One would expect a Rhodes scholar like Murphy to immediately pick up on such suppression of free expression and point directly at another time in history where the universities toed the government line. By the time they realized what a mistake it had been to submit to the security-state it was far too late. Far from protesting for the cameras, the distribution of one-page pamphlets demanding liberty were getting the university-resident authors sent to the guillotine.

You would expect the likes of Rex Murphy to know the story of the White Rose and issue loud public warnings when a government so vilifies protest that the universities start closing their halls to themselves.

You would expect it. You would, however, be disappointed.