It was an awful mess, no matter how you look at it. Contrary to the popular perception, there were a lot more than three people from Guelph protesting in Toronto.

They didn’t get arrested. They didn’t get noticed.

Few people know they were even there. Fewer yet know why they were there.

They also don’t know what the G20 was all about, except that it was a stupid idea to have it in downtown Toronto.

Nor do they know why the “Black Bloc” did the things they did.

After the fact, the lasting impression is of them. These Men (and women) in Black were not fighting aliens. They were the aliens. Because of them, the government won.

The final agreement that came out of the Toronto meeting committed governments to slash deficits in half by 2013 while at the same time “protecting” taxpayers.

There is only one way to reduce deficits without raising taxes: cut government spending on social programs. This is what the 20 most powerful countries in the world took home from Toronto. It is a callous fiscal policy that union and anti-poverty groups were right to protest. If only they could have been heard.

Ever since the Battle of Seattle in 1999, summit meetings attract violent protesters the way decaying flesh attracts maggots. The one brings the other, without fail. It is about time that the legitimate organizations representing the people hurt by globalization rethink their responses.

What if they called a summit and nobody came? Some always will.

The G20 meeting had about two thousand hangers-on accompanying the leaders. They are always willing to travel the world on government expense accounts.

They’ve never seen a public trough they can’t get their snouts into. Where they go, the journalists follow.

Where the parasites and the press go, the Black Bloc is always lurking about, eager to provide the news clips that justify excessive security expenditures. What if everyone else stayed away?

As it stands now, the voices of the social justice groups do not get the attention they deserve.

They stand on the periphery of security zones demanding better behaviour from government leaders. Even at the best of times, their pleas fall on deaf ears. It is time to find a better way. Let the police and the Black Bloc go after each other with all the energy they can muster. The rest of us should try something different.

Instead of begging government leaders to mend their ways, we should convince our communities to stop electing them in the first place.

*****

The obnoxious behaviour of some protesters was matched in equal measure by some of the police. When I watched news coverage of the G20, I was struck by the number of people with cameras. These days, nearly everything that happens is captured by digital camcorders and posted to You Tube. One caught a police officer threatening to arrest a young woman half his size and charge her with assault if she blew a soap bubble near him. A man from Niagara Falls had his artificial leg pulled off prior to his arrest. I think he was charged with “fail to hop quickly enough.”

There are lots of reasons to justify an independent public inquiry into the summit meeting. Location, cost and security all demand scrutiny. We must hold proponents of Black Bloc tactics accountable for the consequences of their activity.

We should do no less with the members of the Integrated Security Unit and the politicians who set the sorry mess in motion.