Tories Move On The Environment: Their G20 summit “Signature Environmental Project”

The G&M, bless their hearts, has provided a .pdf giving a detailed breakdown of the federal government's spending on the G8/G20 summits. There's lots of stuff there to pick over, but I thought I would concentrate on a single item from the report-- just touched on in The Globe article--that Greg Weston mentioned previously in one of his columns.

One of the columns he wrote just before Sun Media allegedly sacked his ass down the highway for telling too much truth about wasteful spending at the twin summits.

I'm talking about The Living Wall, the Harper government's "signature environmental project", according to their tender, at the G8/G20 summit. In other words, the project that was to serve as the government's major statement on the environment at the summit, to serve as a symbol to the G20 of Canada's commitment to a cleaner, greener planet.

First off, both Greg Weston and I were both wrong about the nature of the wall: we thought it was an immense shrubbery. But if you look at this release (and this release) from The Direct Energy Center, where the wall was eventually installed, you realize that it is in fact one of NEDLAW Living Wall Inc.'s vegetal biofilters (picture top left), which use ( paraphrasing from Nedlaw's description) lush, green plants and beneficial microbes to create better indoor spaces by cleaning the air with the same processes that nature uses every day.

The price tag? (click image to enlarge)

I will leave it to my readers to decide whether a quarter million is too much to pay for what, while an interesting and unique piece of technology, is very much like an organic HVAC unit. For myself, the problem is more the reverse: conceptually, the project seems the result of thinking small. This was supposed to be, after all, our "signature" project for the entire summit. Supposed to be Da Bomb, the Pièce de résistance, in other words.

And in the end more money was spent on car rentals.

On The Point Of Black Bloc Tactics

Many have expressed puzzlement at the motivations of that small group of Toronto protesters employing "black bloc" tactics. Dan Dolderman, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who got caught up in and arrested during Sunday's demonstrations, puts it as follows:

The third thing I learned is that pretty much nobody seems to really understand what the protesters using “black bloc” tactics are ultimately trying to accomplish. Nobody seems to believe that they have any sort of real objective or philosophy. Instead, people unanimously believe (literally, every single person I talked to today, and I asked pretty much everyone I talked to for any length of time, including many police), that the violent protesters are simply society’s disenfranchised, with no agenda except to feel powerful and simply cause chaos and vent their anger at “the system” that they feel is responsible for their shitty lives.

Well, I have a theory about that. What the "anarchists" are trying to accomplish is illustrated here:

They are in the noise making business, in other words. Now, you may hear it argued that what they are drowning out is the voices of the legitimate protesters and that's true, but not really relevant. Their intent, what they are trying to do, is squelch the official message of the G8/G20 leaders, so that all the summit appears to amount to is their own violence and the police crackdown that inevitably follows.

And in T.O. they did a pretty good job, aided by the fact that this particular meeting was so content-free as to be positively Seinfeldian. What was in that final statement? Something vague about deficits? Something about banks? Ah but here's a picture of a burning police car, and here's a clip of cops charging a line of peaceful demonstrators. Checkmate, mateys! G8/20 leaders (esp. Mr. Harper) are made to appear impotent; the police look like thugs.

As to police behavior over the weekend, well, I would feel better about it if something useful had actually been accomplished, but we seem be to witnessing just another episode of the same show that gets put on whenever these summits are held. Given that the anarchists communicate with each other the same way everyone else does these days--facebook, twitter feeds, text messages--all of which are easily monitored, I don't see why something can't be done between summits to put a dent in these guys' activities.

...something to break a cycle that is now well into its second decade and is, frankly, getting old.