Edward Nixon

There has been much consternation and alarm about the G20 this June 25 – 27 in Toronto. Including among many, this recent Torontoist tweet citing Mayor Miller: “The institution of the federal government doesn’t understand Toronto”? http://bit.ly/dlJCcm .” An email went around today from a co-tenant at the Centre for Social Innovation seeking ideas for witty protest, insightful intervention, and related “culture jamming.”

It is to weep short splurts of sarcastic saline solution. Who is listening? To whom? And do some among the array of protesters grasp that this very Canadian initiative–the G20–is about breaking the hold of “the West” and/or “the North” on “world” discourse? We have an ideological smorgasbord of leaders, some like Lulo who have helped raise millions out of poverty, and not some rigid falanx of the “Washington Consensus.” Certainly, much is pomp without much circumstance. It is too expensive (we’d like an audit Prime Minister). However, face-to-face still matters and this let’s leaders from every continent eyeball each other and try to lever some key agenda items into the floating consensus of world governance, such as it is.

Civil protest is of course a central, necessary part of any breathing democracy, any even remotely functioning state. Black Bloc play-time and its requisite smashed windows, not so much. Culture Jamming: for or against or to reveal what precisely? Oh I know I’d get a list but I’m “begging” for detail, research, insight and some sense of comment or action that rises above the bleating of spoiled children of the West, that transcends obvious left (or right) cliche.

If one wishes to “make change happen” then it’s a multi-terrain game. It may be peaceful protest, it may be satire, it may be cultural intervention it is also the hard work of electoral politics, of coalition building across representative communities. It is about engaging, what many protesters might dismiss as oppose to celebrate, the broad middle class. Connecting the middle class to those who are not progressing or being helped to rise out of poverty and powerlessness. It’s about unifying and connecting with an open mind, humility for the other, and a grasp of “real data” to back up and inform the questions (more than “issues”) one poses.

If one takes this broad, multi-terrain, well-informed, open-minded approach, then that would be something the leaders of the G20 and large segments of their electors and citizens, would “hear.” And what better place to have heard insightful contrapuntal opinion and questions than in Toronto?