...due to the actions of the "police." I won't hold my breathe...
Jonathan Kay on the extraordinary professionalism of Toronto’s G20 police force
June 27, 2010 – 2:23 am
Some of my American friends have been emailing me to ask whether “Toronto is burning”? On YouTube and Twitter, they’ve been following the “highlights” of Saturday’s G20 riots — the wrecked cars and the broken storefront windows — and assumed that Toronto had become one giant Watts.
It’s not. This is one of those stories the social media has gotten wrong: a million tweeters all tweeting up the same three burning police cruisers and few dozen wrecked storefronts. The number of protestors wasn’t even that big (even if the media insists on calling the protests “massive.”) The estimate I’ve seen thrown around is about 10,000. To put that figure in perspective, the number of protestors who swarmed Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas in 2001 was approximately 100,000 — tens times as large.
At around 7pm last night, I biked south down Yonge Street, where a lot of the violence took place. I was surprised to see that the main commercial drag was thronged — with shoppers and diners going out on the town. Yes, I saw boarded up windows at Burger King, Starbucks, Money Mart and the “Club Zanzibar” strip club (Marquee: “Forget G8. Try G-strings”). Tim Horton’s and Swiss Chalet had been smashed, too. But the other businesses were mostly open. At the intersection of Dundas and Yonge, a band was playing. Smiling people were posing in front of the scattered vandalized stores and taking pictures. The whole area was in tourist mode.
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