One year later: still no G20 answers
On Monday, the Ontario attorney general’s ministry released statistics showing more than 1,100 people were detained during the G20 summit, 317 were charged and only 24 people have been convicted so far.
On Tuesday, Premier Dalton McGuinty again rejected any thought of a full provincial inquiry. Instead, he said it’s up to Harper to call for such a probe because the summit was a federal government initiative.
Also on Tuesday, Ontario Ombudsman André Marin said in his annual report that secrecy within the provincial government has been growing for years and culminated with the “granddaddy of all secret manoeuvres” during the summit, “which was the non-publication of a (provincial) regulation which extended extraordinary, likely illegal, powers to the police during the G20.”
That same day, the RCMP confirmed it is investigating allegations that Harper’s cabinet misappropriated millions in G8 money spent in the Parry-Sound-Muskoka riding of Treasury Board President Tony Clement.
“Like a banana republic” is how Ruby describes our inability to get answers a full year after the summit.
Ruby will be on a panel of experts Thursday evening discussing the G20 controversy. The event, entitled “G20: Lessons Learned, Messages Lost,” is sponsored by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Labour Congress and the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights. It starts at 6:30 p.m. at Bennett Lecture Hall at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.
Since the summit ended, there have been more than half a dozen small “reviews” by police and government agencies and boards into specific aspects of the summit. But none of these reviews has the mandate of conducting an overall probe into all facets of the summit — from how the money was spent to who planned the security.
Only Harper can order such a review.
Hepburn: One year later: still no G20 answers - thestar.com