Toronto the not-so-good

BY THE standards of the protests that typically accompany summits of world leaders, the damage following last weekend’s G20 gathering in Toronto was relatively modest: some broken shop windows downtown and a few burnt-out police cars. Yet the unrest has prompted an orgy of handwringing in Canada’s financial capital, which still clings to its moniker bestowed by a Victorian-era mayor of Toronto the Good.

According to the mayor, David Miller, protests in the city have generally been nonviolent, and tended to congregate around the American consulate. That made many locals consider the government’s security preparations overkill. A whopping C$1 billion ($1 billion) was spent to protect the G8 and G20 summits (the latter was held in Huntsville, north of the city). Part of this went to building an unsightly concrete and steel fence downtown, and setting up ringed cordons manned by some 15,000 police within it.

In contrast, the demonstrations never exceeded 10,000 people. However, the protesters did abandon their traditional preference for symbols of foreign imperialism and attacked local banks and shops. “The idea that this was an effective way to show off Toronto to foreign guests is bewilderingly stupid”, opined the Toronto Star. “Canadian authorities created a city no citizen could recognise and no visitor could admire. Then, they allowed a pack of brutes to trash it.”

Other critics accused the police of doing too much rather than too little. Although there were no cases of outright brutality, security forces did use rubber bullets and tear gas to subdue protesters—the latter for the first time in recent memory. They were also surprisingly indiscriminate in their choice of targets: among the 900 people arrested were journalists and civil-rights observers, and one peaceful crowd was broken up just after completing a lusty rendition of “O Canada”, the national anthem.

The scene has prompted many Canadians to question their long-held assumptions about their own, well, goodness. Some stout patriots found Canadian authorship of such rabblerousing inconceivable. Both Mr Miller and the publisher of the country’s largest newspaper, who wrote a front-page editorial, said they were sure that foreigners or “the violent dregs of nihilism from around the world”, as the publisher put it, were responsible. The prime minister, Stephen Harper, has opted for a few-bad-apples explanation: he called the protesters “thugs” and said their actions justified the security expense. Some Toronto newspapers called the conflicts historic, forgetting the frequent 19th riots between Irish Protestants and Catholics, some of which were bigger and more violent.

With the summit over, most residents will simply be happy to return to their customary civility. On Monday morning at Union Station, a busy commuter hub, a policeman, riot helmet dangling from his belt, stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs warning people the wet floor was slippery and they should watch their step. No one seemed to think he was being anything but solicitous.