The new sheriff of Cowtown, who doubles as Calgary's mayor, stood behind City Hall glass on Sunday, carefully watching the first -- and last -- legal parade of G-8 protesters stroll by. Behind him, dozens of riot police were armed and ready lest the uneventful march turn into a smash bash.
Dave Bronconnier, 39, used to be a mild-mannered policy wonk of an alderman who could recite west Calgary redevelopment schemes from memory and quote transit policy by section and subsection.
But as a rookie mayor, he's suddenly gone gunslinger, deploying civic bylaws to clear city parks and cutting off public plazas from use as incubators for protest, almost daring rabble-rousers to gather for a bongo-banging on city land.
He's brushed up on the procedures for declaring a state of local emergency and carries around a thick binder full of contact numbers with instructions on how to send in the cop calvary if an incident appears remotely threatening.
But it's his tough land-use policy that has caught the approving eye of Calgarians, police and senior governments.
Former G-8 summit hosts told Calgary that giving activists space even for innocuous-sounding musical concerts tended to crank up the volume of peace chants into loud, angry roars of protest.
That was music to Bronconnier's ears and he loudly and proudly embraced the idea of making Calgary the first host city to deny anti-G-8 activism a civic launch pad.
Today, the city will be in court fending off a challenge to its all-clear parks edict. The president of the Alberta Federation of Labour insists the unions' freedom of assembly, association and speech rights have been infringed by the city's repeated denials to applications for events on public property.
It's doubtful the injunction action will succeed and it's too late to have much of an impact in any event, so Bronconnier has already wrestled any demonstrations to the street.
Now let's be clear. Calgary is the friendliest of cities and is less than two weeks away from its wild Stampede bash, otherwise known as the World's Longest Hangover.
But Bronconnier's tough policy fits like a skin-tight pair of jeans on a city where sporting green hair while blocking access to business poses a very big risk to that individual's physical health. This is, after all, a city where an earlier mayor's popularity soared after an attack on "bums and creeps" coming to town from Eastern Canada. That mayor ended up being called Premier Ralph Klein.
So if activists carry through on their threat to block off motor vehicle access to the downtown on Wednesday, it may just give inbound commuters an excuse to accelerate their pickups to full ramming speed.
During the summit itself, the average Calgarian would probably view a well-swung police baton as kid-glove treatment for a window smasher and an empty paddy wagon a waste of transportation space if cops are pelted with rocks.
Calgary's no-nonsense attitude has put Bronconnier in a no-lose position. If protests rake the city this week, the mayor will have all the proof he needs that his get-tough policy was necessary to prevent even more destruction. If all is calm and Ottawa turns into the G-8's tear-gas capital, Bronconnier can claim credit for running the rebel yellers out of town. It's elevated a shy, unassuming father of four, whom few Calgarians could have picked out of a crowd last year, into a bit of a local phenomenon.
The proof was in a filled-to-capacity Greek restaurant that suddenly found an empty table when we walked in Sunday evening without a reservation to sit amid groups of diners giving Bronconnier an "atta boy" thumbs-up greeting.
The mayor tries his best to downplay his hard-line position, calling it "careful and measured." He insists the off-limits park policy had nothing to do with denying protest a voice.
"Look, if people are bent on vandalizing or doing damage to property, they're going to do it regardless," he says.
He's almost more preoccupied with performing white-hat welcome ceremonies for arriving leaders today and hosting the summit's largest social bash tonight.
But if Calgary delivers a sleepy summit on the streets after denying protest a gathering point, the tough new sheriff in town will gain the most as the host.
Don Martin can be reached at dmartin@sns.southam.ca
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