G20

A few odd notes:

• There has been a lot of discussion about the violence -- police, Black Bloc, etc. -- but little discussion of the implicit complicity of the media.  There was a vigil organized on Sunday by the SCM (actually, by Maggie Helwig, whom I remember from her anti-nuclear protest days when we were both students at Trent, as well as more recently in her persona as a divinity student at Trinity) which went from St. James' Cathedral to the fence around the G20.  I knew that it was going to occur, but I had a hard time finding out anything about it.  Eventually I found a reference from a live blog from 6:20 on Sunday saying: "Nancy Paiva has just returned from the prayer vigil at King and Bay. A riot officer there told her that they will let organizer Maggie Helwig and other participants remain as long as they want, with no plans for arrest as they are not breaking any laws."  There was no coverage at all by any mainstream media, presumably because there was no likelihood of violence and it was therefore not newsworthy.  Similarly, but less dramatically, most of the coverage of the Saturday protests focussed on the violence of the Bloc, and not the various (extremely various) messages being set out by the much more numerous other protesters.  As long as coverage of protest by the media is largely determined by actual or potential confrontation or violence, there will be a symbiotic relationship between violent protesters and non-violent organizers who depend on the potential for confrontation to get them the media coverage they do get.
• Speaking of the effectiveness of media coverage, protesters need to get their messages more focussed.  I don't have any idea how many different messages were being put out by the participants in the major protest on Saturday, but I know that there were a wide variety of them, sometimes very tenuously linked.  But while ten[s of] thousand[s] protesters (I've heard different figures, between 10,000 and 25,000) with a single message might be attention-grabbing in itself if they had one common clearly defined message, a spectrum of loosely-associated different messages is not going to get much attention, even if a lot of different groups have congregated to swell the total numbers.
• The overreaction of the banks and other financial district pillars was ridiculous.  Most workers had to stay away starting Monday.  I can only conclude that this was as a result of fear of insurance/tortious liability from possible problems if employees got caught up in some form of confrontation; in a way, it's reminiscent of the episode years ago when a decision that safer play sets would be the standard for all new Toronto Board of Education playgrounds suddenly became the basis for tearing down all the existing sets and replacing them, because the new standard changed the liability model and would have vastly increased insurance costs.  We live in a litigious and cowed-by-insurance society.
• The people who came out absolutely worst from all of this, IMHO, were the provincial government.  They took a statute which is basically designed to allow police to function for public buildings in the way that security guards do for private ones and turned it into a general justification for arbitrary search and seizure, and did so by an Order in Council designed to fly under the radar, presumably so that there would be no Charter challenge beforehand.  Too bad that the practical alternative to the Liberals are the Conservatives, who are even more Law'n'Order posturers, at the next election.