salutin: "it isn’t the fake lake that bothers me, it’s the fake leadership. why are we enduring this?"

Rick Salutin has an excellent column on how the G20 is strangling Toronto.

Shut off the traffic and impede the pedestrians. Shopping dies, business dies. People are afraid to go to work, either due to the checkpoints or the fertilizer bombers. Cancel the components that make cities attractive – the art gallery, theatre, the university. Friends of friends postpone their wedding on the Toronto Islands, because their visiting parents may have trouble reaching their hotel inside the security barrier. Special-education kids won’t get bused to school even though it’s outside the dread Zone. Everything dies by proximity to security.

At least the SARS shutdown could be blamed on a virus. But this is definitive proof that we live in the new age of the security state. It ruins everything, even the return of former Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay. It usurps press coverage – they aren’t allowed to go up to Huntsville for the preceding G8; instead they have to sit around a fake lake out at the CNE.

I want to be clear (as a lake). It isn’t the fake lake that bothers me, it’s the fake leadership. Why are we enduring this? So our precious leaders can deal with the wretched economy that their previous policies bestowed on us. And what have they already decided to do? Nothing, based on “leadership” provided by the summit host, our own PM.

Read it here: "Turning a vibrant town into a desert".

On a related note, Imp Strump asks, "Why are they holding the G20 here if they don't want the trappings of a city?"