Leader summits: older and stupider
Though you’d scarcely think that possible given where we’ve been.
A long long time ago – 1988 if my middle aged memory still serves me well enough – Toronto hosted a G7 summit. Reagan. Thatcher. Mulroney, et al. That was the era. I was studying (nominally anyway) in Montréal but was spending the summer in Toronto, working as an intern reporter at the Toronto Star.
There was no fake lake. But back then they were also obsessed with security. I remember hearing stories of helicopters landing on apartment buildings after spotting people working on the roof, some 5km from the Toronto Convention Centre. “Not too far away for a rocket launcher,” the cop quipped to my friend who was relaying this tale. Then, as now, cops say some pretty wacky things.
There was a big fence around everything too, though nothing like the pictures I’ve seen. And police. Everywhere.
While all my friends were organizing and participating in the dazzling array of marches, alternative summits, teach-ins, go-to-the-fence things and what not, I was inside the security cordon. Then, as now, there was a sort of media pavillion. I called it Summitland. There was free food and free booze, 24/7. Inside the summit was swarming with journalists, cranking out hundreds if not thousands of words a day about… well, not a lot.
I remember looking up to the senior journalists hoping to glean some insight into what it all meant, because, frankly I couldn’t quite tell what all the fuss was about. The final draft communiqué was in open circulation on the day the summit began.They were counting angels on a pin head.
I remember a big Star scoop that a reporter landed – was it Carol Goar? – on a big kerfuffle over the omission or inclusion of the adverb ‘strongly’ before ‘endorse the free trade agreement’. Front page news about a one word edit performed dozens of times a night in the newsroom at 1 Yonge Street.
I went to “off the record” press briefings by government officials about issues related to the money supply where – near as I could figure – they were reading media statements about to be released.
But we all had our assignments. Chris Flanagan – a fellow intern – interviewed Margaret Thatcher’s hair dresser. That the world’s most famous “Hair Helmet” actually had “fine, angelic” hair was news.
My assignment was to camp out in the lobby of the then Harbour Castle Hilton – where the Japanese and Italian Prime ministers were staying – in case anyone blew it up. Yep about as expendable as you can get.
Of course there were no bombs, no guns – apart from the one the RCMP snuck past their own security cordon as a test – no violence. But that didn’t stop the cops – or the media for that matter – from looking for it. In fact in some ways, the media were worse than the cops.
I remember much excitement whispered among the general assignment crowd – the usual home of us bullet catcher and colour story reporters – over an “IRA guy” that the police were tracking down. But our head crime reporters were tracking him down too. At one point Cal Millar gave me a secret message to deliver to city editor Lou Clancy (there were very few cell phones back then): “the sting was on.”
They were so convinced they had a bone fide terrorist they could hardly contain ourselves. They had too. The walls had ears – and Sun reporters. Turns out the poor guy who got stung had shared an apartment once upon a time with a mate who’d been a member of Sinn Féin. But they scrambled everyone to come up with dirt on this guy – where he hung out, who were his friends, what did he say?
Shelley Page and Stephanie Thorson were ordered to change into something revealing and see what they could flirt out of the bartenders at Crooks, the Bloor Annex bar where he apparently hung out.
There was an air of desperate excitement about it all – a need to prove that all the expense, the intrusion into peoples’ lives, the invasion of jackbooted, truncheon-toting drones, the excess, the hype – was all worth it. And that The Star would cover the summit better than anyone.
I felt enormously shamed and sixty seven kinds of useless. The Star’s greatest ambition for me was that my steno notes would not be too blood-soaked after the explosion to prevent them from being used for “colour.” My outside-wall friends looked at me like I was a sellout freak, and my inside-wall colleagues thought I was a wet blanket. It was at once impossible and absurd. I was so relieved when it was over. And I knew my days as a journalist were numbered.
What’s my point?
Useless pageantry isn’t new. We’ve had these spectacles of protest and repression before. We protest and they clamp down, and they ease off just a bit after a while. But things never go back quite the way they were. They always keep a bit more of our democracy.
I want to stand in solidarity with all my friends at the G8/G20 now but I have to say, the summit is a useless show of photo-ops, pre-cooked statements putting a glitz on decisions that were made months if not years ago. Was then. Is now. This ain’t Yalta.
I see us mounting this extraordinary effort to rail against this charade and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some other way we could deploy all those hours of work, all that money to make something that would last, or build something we could sustain, or dare I say, put it towards some effort where we could see some progress.
June 25th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
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June 25th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
The People’s Summit is/was AWESOME.
livestreamed today again by rabble.ca