Don't you just wish those G-8 and G-20 conferences were over already? What's going to be accomplished? I'll tell ya not much, if anything.
But there has been much ado about the Toronto fake lake that was built for between $57,000 and $2 million (depending on whose numbers you believe) to depict for the summit attendees and the accompanying reporters what they might have seen if they had been allowed to actually move beyond the designated venues.
Kinda sad.
So they crafted a 10 cm deep pond (in Saskatchewan we call them sloughs) to depict one of the Great Lakes, even though the real thing will be less than a half mile away. That means the Astroturf leading up to the slough well, that'll be the Prairies my friends. Three big chunks of gravel after the Astro turf. That's the Rockies and of course those two dead goldfish in a bowl just beyond the slough, that my boy, is the Maritimes. Now you've seen Canada. You can go home now.
Oh those guys in the rubber raft in the middle of the slough? That might be Jim Flaherty and Stevie Harper, sometimes known as Gilligan and The Skipper.
Oh no, now we have to re-open that age-old debate. Who was hotter --- Marianne or Ginger? Will the madness never end?
The slough was built so that visiting journalists would get a better sense of what Canada is about geographically, without having to leave the conference centre, wherever that is.
As one of the reporters noted however, "we're grumpy, cynical business and political writers, not tourism and travel reporters. We probably won't even bother looking out a window."
In the meantime, the Canadian security forces have turned Toronto into a police state to protect the so-called world leaders at these so-called economic summits from the so-called protestors. Of course the protestors and demonstrators are typically Canadian. They had a dress rehearsal on Monday to protest poverty. Yep, that's it. I think we're all pretty well against poverty. But that was their cause of the day on Monday.
To prove the power of the protest movement, they took over a gas station in downtown Toronto. I kid you not, they stormed the pumps and took over the red licorice and confiscated the sunflower seeds and completely overwhelmed the two gas station attendants, all in the name of eradicating poverty.
What they did next, I don't know. Maybe they handed out free blue coloured windshield washer fluid to protest the use of pink windshield washer fluid. There was no word on whether the Darth Vader-like security forces descended on them with batons ablazing to quell this made in Canada riot rehearsal.
It was oh so Canadian in style. I loved it. Bemused? You bet. The real impromptu riots were scheduled to begin Tuesday with the arrival of the professional demonstrators.
So explain to us again why Canada had to spend $1.2 billion to hold a G-8/20 conference that will resolve nothing when they could have held a $48 telephone conference call to arrive at no conclusion.
Stevie Wonder, that Harper boy, could have had his foreign affairs minister take pictures of the slough, Astroturf, gravel and goldfish and e-mail them to his foreign affairs friends and the grumpy business/political writers so they could get on with their summer vacation plans.
Next week: Oh maybe something on that World Cup thing. I understand it's supposed to be important too!
