“This is a five-year-old event.”

That’s former police chief and current federal Liberal candidate Bill Blair on CTV recently, responding to a demand from NDP MP Peggy Nash that he “take responsibility” for the behaviour of his police during the G20 summit held in Toronto in 2010. Five years! That’s half a decade!

In five years, the Blue Jays went from home-run-crushing losers to home-run-crushing contenders, Drake went from being the biggest music star in Toronto to being the biggest music star in The 6, Taylor Swift and Kanye West went from having recently been accidentally awkward on stage together at the MTV awards to being purposely awkward on stage together at the MTV awards. It’s a different world!

“All of those questions have been answered,” Blair went on in the CTV segment. “I have been fully accountable to the civilian oversight that I was responsible to and the people that I have served.”

Still and all, despite his allegedly exhaustive question-answering and accountability-taking, some of those people he served — including opponents like Nash and commenters like yours truly and the editorial board of the Globe and Mail, persist in asking questions about the “most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.”

Tuesday, Blair took to the pages of the Globe to finally settle the matter, in a piece headlined, “I never wavered from my duty to keep Toronto safe.”

If that sounds like an oddly self-celebrating title for a piece in which he purports to show how accountable he’s held himself for his force’s mass suspension and violation of the constitutional rights that he’d sworn an oath to protect, check out his opening:

“The G20 summit presented unprecedented challenges to police. The last-minute venue change left only a few months to prepare. The scale of the event required an integrated security response, headed by the RCMP, staffed by 22 police services. Operational command for downtown Toronto was the responsibility of a TPS Superintendent, under the direction of the RCMP-led Integrated Security Unit. It is a matter of public record that I appeared nowhere on the G20 organizational chart. I did not give, nor authorize, any operational commands.”

So, the buck stops … well, it stops with those who foisted the thing on us on short notice. And with the RCMP that led security efforts. And some TPS Superintendent underling of Blair’s who reported to the RCMP. And those names on the org chart, of those who gave and authorized commands. Plenty of blame to go around.

But the Toronto police chief who has been so accountable? See, he wasn’t involved (except, he goes on to say in the next paragraph, when he intervened to stop a kettling incident in progress when he became aware of it).

This seems like an important passage in understanding Blair’s answering of questions and taking of responsibility. He goes on to outline the steps he took to repair the locks on the old barn door and to round up some of the horses out galloping in the wild — he accepted recommendations from reports and ordered discipline for a few. But as to the hows and whys … he says what sounds to me suspiciously like, “It wasn’t me.”

If Blair wants to credibly pass the buck, it would be nice (in the interests of actual accountability) if he’d be blunt about it. Is all that talk about the planning and the RCMP and the org chart meant to suggest, as I’ve heard some Liberal party advocates say recently, that Blair is being made a fall guy for some higher-ups who called the shots? If so, he could tell us who gave the orders, how Blair was sidelined, what steps he took to try to intervene, how he was left holding the bag for other people’s mischief or mistakes.

That sort of directness may not be something we associate with police bureaucrats. But it is something we demand (often fruitlessly) of political candidates, and something we require when we’re seeking accountability.

This is without getting into Blair’s own direct role in the implementation and miscommunication about the famous “fence law” that provided cover for so many abuses of power, and his G20 press conference in which he led the public to believe that toys taken from medieval role-playing gamers and weapons seized in unrelated crimes were evidence of the terrorist capabilities of G20 protesters. But those are specific cases, at least, where Blair has in the past admitted some personal fault.

Blair concludes his Globe piece, “I took responsibility, held myself and my people accountable….”

Did he?

I think when most of us demand accountability, we want a public explanation of how and why something happened, and, if the explanation is not sufficiently exculpatory, the resignation, firing or punishment of those who were (or should have been) in charge. In the world of politics Blair is trying to enter, the tradition (broken by the same Prime Minister Blair is trying to turf) is for a minister of the Crown to resign because of the scandalous actions of those he or she supervises.

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That’s what accountability actually looks like.

Five years is a long time. But the G20 was a big event. And as much as Blair says all the questions have been answered, some of us fear we’ll still have to be asking them for a long time to come.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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