ยป Why is the G20 Summit in Toronto?
Security for the 2-day G20 Summit in Toronto is going to cost about as much as the 2-week winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler. Granted, the anarchists won’t get sent packing by fans using the national anthem as a Long-Range Acoustic Device. I assume that the overhead in setting up security apparati and tearing it down is about the same as running it for two weeks in the middle.
But I thought the whole point of holding the G8 summits in cute little resorts like Huntsville, Kananaskis and Montebello is that they’re easy to secure. Why don’t they hold the G20 summit somewhere remote? Is it because the government wants to give protesters a chance to make their voice heard?
The original, publicly-announced plan was to have both the G8 and G20 summits in Huntsville. Then they said that they couldn’t have the G20 in Huntsville because of a lack of hotel rooms. (If that’s the case, then how could they possibly not have considered that before making the original decision to have the G20 there?)
It seems to me that it would have been a lot easier and cheaper to just build a big new secure conference centre / hotel in a picturesque location in Huntsville than to spend the better part of one billion dollars to increase security in downtown Toronto and disrupt transportation and shut down many businesses (including the CN Tower and moving Blue Jays games).
Don
27 May 10 at 12:29 pm