The day before the G20 summit began in Pittsburgh last September, store owners in the trendy Strip District, located next to the city's convention centre, boarded up their windows and hung signs informing the hordes of expected protesters that each building was “locally owned and operated.”
Police had told them that anarchists would target the area, and Becky Rodgers, president of Neighbors in the Strip, a community development non-profit, put employees on rooftops, watching for signs of trouble. But with the world leaders just blocks away, all they saw in every direction were empty streets.
“It was crazy,” she said. “You could throw a bowling ball down the street and not hit anyone. We didn't suffer any damage, but we did suffer the loss of business.”
With the G20 summit in Toronto just two weeks away, the city has whipped itself into a frenzy of anticipation, the population literally divided by security perimeters and free-speech zones. The prospect of welcoming U.S. President Barack Obama and his fellow bigwigs is being pitched as an opportunity to showcase Toronto to the world, and the leaders are slated to discuss weighty issues of global economic recovery. But locals worry about the economic impact, and whether the event will be greeted with shattered glass and tear gas.
It is a scenario that will sound familiar to Pittsburgh and London, the last two major cities to host the gathering of world leaders. The cost of the event is huge – $30-million in London, $18-million (U.S.) in Pittsburgh, more than $1-billion in Toronto – while the payoff is growing less obvious.
“I don't think many Londoners actually felt that they were participating in anything especially important or historic,” said Mark Morris, senior press officer for the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group. “I think for most people the dominant memory ... was the policing of the event.”
The figure for Canada is much higher than the past two summits, partly because it covers two summits. Canada was planning to host the G8 in Huntsville, Ont., while Seoul was the original spring G20 location. The plans were disrupted in late September when world leaders decided the G20 – which includes bigger developing countries – would supplant the G8 as the key international economic council. In November, the Harper government decided to move the G20 to Toronto, because the population of officials that travels with the G20 leaders was getting too big.
Circumstances have forced the summit on Toronto, with the attendant security costs involved in playing host in a large metropolitan centre. Like Toronto, the London gathering in April, 2009, was the largest security operation in the country's history (although the Metropolitan Police were given little advance warning of the location). Unlike Toronto, Greater London, whose population is 7.5 million, is experienced in holding huge events and in dealing with unrest.
Impact? The summit itself succeeded in increasing international stimulus spending in the face of the global financial crisis, but most headlines centred on a 47-year-old newspaper vendor named Ian Tomlinson, who died making his way home through a protest. While police initially said Mr. Tomlinson simply collapsed, video footage obtained by a newspaper a week later revealed he had been shoved to the ground by a uniformed officer.
Mr. Morris said it is hard to weigh such incidents against the benefit of having world leaders in the city. “Perhaps the only really positive and memorable experience from the G20 conference was the visit that Michelle Obama made while the conference was taking place,” he said.
In Pittsburgh, where the G20 was held in September, 2009, a riot broke out after university students gathered to catch a glimpse of the Obamas entering a leaders' reception at a picturesque arboretum. The unexpected number of rubberneckers caught police off guard and they demanded that students disperse, eventually deploying tear gas and a sound canon.
But Rob McGrath, president and chief executive officer of VisitPittsburgh, the city's tourism office, said that, despite the violent images broadcast from the clash, the G20's benefit to the rust-belt city, population 335,000, has been profound. “We wanted to tell a story about this destination and we had a tremendous opportunity to do that,” he said. “We're still feeling the PR connects.”
