Scenes from a spoiled party

>> Inside the Montreal Conference

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

The swagger was gone out of this year's edition of the Conférence de Montréal: the contrast with the conference two years ago was striking. Then, illustrious economists and overpaid CEOs gave long, dull speeches to other economists about how profitable and innovative they were. Press accreditations were handed out as freely as business cards. There was a sparkle in the air: of the success of an economic system that had finally shaken off the restrictions imposed on it by misguided persons of dusty political persuasions. It had found its legs and was striding along as it should.

There are indelible images from this year's conference that attest to the change in mood this year. Take, for example, the paranoia of the conference organizers and security. And the clumps of locked-out businessmen huddled in Dominion Square, talking fretfully on their cell phones. The same clumps of businessmen stampeding across the street, briefcases in hand, trying to get in through an underground tunnel from the adjacent CIBC building. The businessmen stymied as a half-dozen face-painted teenagers ganged up at the CIBC door. One rebuffed businessman sullenly giving the finger to the teenagers before walking away in disgust.

And even when they could all finally get in, there was no glowing talk of the triumphs of the new capitalism inside. They scarcely needed Alexa McDonough there to tell them as she did at lunch Tuesday that they'd all screwed up. The backlash they'd all been warned about had set in, and it set the tone of the conference through the whole second day.

There were the photos in the newspapers, for one. On every newspaper, the protest was page one. Gloved riot police grasping protesters' faces in the Globe and Mail and Le Devoir. The grimaces of pain in the Gazette and Le Journal de Montreal. It was all so embarrassing. And the journalists kept asking about it! They were barely even mentioning Jacques Delors' speech on the European union, or the debate about currency.

And then there was OECD head Donald Johnston, who compared himself and his fellow MAI negotiators to Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. If only the people of the world were better informed, he fretted, they'd understand what the MAI really was.

By the time former Thatcher-era minister Michael Portillo took the podium to talk about the crisis in capitalism, it was all beginning to feel redundant. The crisis was staring them in the face. Every other speaker talked about how the world needed a more equitable distribution of wealth to keep it from exploding. Perhaps they heard the firecrackers going off outside.

The same day, I spoke to a young protester about his experience blockading the Sheraton's doors, right in front of the hotel's Le Boulevard restaurant, which serves cheeseburgers at $12 a pop. In an odd sort of way he sounded like Donald Johnston, yearning to communicate with the other side of the economic divide: "You get people who say we're a bunch of drug-taking students who've got nothing better to do and that it would be a good idea for us to get a job and cut our hair. They've been driving and maybe at one time they've been hassled by a squeegee, but then they can just drive away. They don't live in the areas where people are dumpster-diving to get food.

"It's very difficult to get these two worlds together. The only chance you get to dialogue with these people is to stop them on the way into the hotel at conferences like this one."

It was a messy, brutal dialogue, but a dialogue all the same.