Thursday, July 08, 2010

Three more G20 questions

1. As I blogged about recently, there have been instances of authorities making observably blatantly false statements in the media. The two I noticed were G20 Director General Sanjeev Chowdhury's assertion that downtown Toronto is empty on weekends, and Police Chief Bill Blair's (admittedly clever) attempt to imply that there's no valid reason why an innocent passer-by would be at Queen & Spadina on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

But who was their target audience for these statements? Who were they trying to win over? By making such clearly false statements, they are losing all credibility in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands (millions? probably millions when you include tourists and former residents) of people who have seen these parts of the city with their own eyes. Which also means that the people they are trying to win over aren't among these millions. So who are these people who have never been to downtown Toronto, who are so concerned about the quality of security response in Toronto, and whose favour is so important that they're willing to throw away their credibility in the eyes of the millions?

2. A number of parties have gone out of their way to laud the police, most astonishingly City Council's recent vote to “commend the outstanding work” of the police department.

My question: What exactly did the police do that these parties think is exceptionally good?

I think we can all agree that rounding up and detaining hundreds of innocent people is subpar police work. We expect better of our police. And I think we can all agree that letting the black bloc people run their full gamut, change clothes, and vanish into the crowd unhindered when outnumbered 50 to one by police is also subpar police work.

So this means that, in some area, the police must have exceeded expectations. Especially for City Council to go out of their way to have this symbolic vote two weeks after the fact, when they could have just quietly gone about City business and no one would have noticed. So what did the police do that was good enough to outweigh the bad and earn them laurels whose absence would have gone unnoticed?

3. It seems that the G20 themselves are especially concerned about having all countries reduce their debt. My question, and you might have to explain it slowly because I have no economics training: why does a country care about other countries' debt levels? How does US or British or Greek debt affect Canada?

Is this analogous to individuals' household debt? I have always felt vaguely safer because I have less debt than most of my contemporaries. Am I mistaken in this feeling, and if so, why? Is my neighbour's debt really bad for me? If so, how?

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