Canada Preps for G8 Summit

During a diplomatic junket to Italy last month, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien joked to reporters that the mountain resort he selected as ground zero for next week's G8 Summit is guarded "from the back by mountains, from the front by a river, from the south by an Indian village and from the north by 500 bears." Chretien was exaggerating the enclave's fortifications. But not by much.

Kananaskis Village, an upscale hideaway in the Rockies, about an hour's drive west of Calgary in southwestern Alberta, is about as remote as Seattle and Genoa were accessible. There are grizzly bears and whitewater rivers and a First Nations reserve in the area. Yet world leaders won't be thrust unprotected into the middle of an untamed western wilderness. The security zone around Kananaskis will be patrolled by thousands of soldiers and Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers. And while they'll be there to hunt down rogue terrorists and stray anti-globalization activists, they probably won't mind using their night-vision goggles to fire potshots at the odd grizzly. After all, they don't want all that high-tech weaponry to go to waste.

Only one highway leads to the summit, a two-lane road heading south into the Kananaskis valley off the main east-west TransCanada thoroughfare. There are costs, of course, to such seclusion. With only 400 beds available on-site for the June 26 and 27 hoe-down, delegations from each of the member nations will have to be tiny; without bunks for his entire security and public relations entourage, there's talk that George W. Bush won't even be staying in Kananaskis. There's also a tremendous financial cost for Canada, which is spending an estimated $500 million to host its G8 brethren for two days -- about as much money as Canada has promised to dedicate to the much-ballyhooed New Partnership for Africa's Development, which has been assigned the awkward acronym NEPAD and is supposed to be the centerpiece of summit discussions.

There are many more delicious ironies and oddities to consider. At a pre-summit meeting of G8 environment ministers in the nearby resort town of Banff earlier this year, a draft of the final communiqué that was supposed to be written at the policy-setting mini-conference was leaked to media before the ministers even met. Meanwhile, at the same time as Canadian government officials were boasting of their consultations and cooperation with activists intending to target Kananaskis for peaceful protest, they were simultaneously working to undermine plans for a "solidarity village," a "festival of resistance" featuring big-name musicians and workshops that activist organizers believed would draw more than 10,000 people.

On the verge of signing a deal with the Stoney First Nation that would have permitted activists to camp out on the reserve where the road to Kananaskis meets the TransCanada, solidarity village organizers were surprised when Stoney leaders abruptly closed the door. Last week, news broke that the Stoney are being given $300,000 by the Canadian government for security, first aid and CPR courses ("capacity training," explained a government spokesperson) during the summit. "Now we know that the federal government paid to prevent G8 dissenters from being able to organize a peaceful response to the summit," reacted trade campaigner David Robbins of the left-leaning Council of Canadians.

Realizing that land near Kananaskis was at an insurmountable premium, activists shifted their efforts to Calgary, the oil capital of Canada -- a city with the distinction of being considered conservative in a province with the politics of Texas. Protest organizers, accordingly, weren't shocked when their requests for civic land on which to hold some sort of rally were promptly denied. Calgary Mayor Dave Bronconnier, affectionately called "Bronco" by a local tabloid, reminded activists that no political gatherings are allowed in city parks (even though, as many reports noted, Bronconnier recently kicked off his own leadership campaign with a picnic in a park). Still, no dice; that sort of logic doesn't work on a civic politician who, when asked about the right to express dissent, replied "The 1960s are over."