Well my day today again started fairly early with a line up at 7:30 to get into the Bella Center, fortunately today the line actually moved so I was in after about 30/40 minutes. If you got in with an NGO then you didn’t have access to as much of the Bella Center as in previous days as the section of the main hall near the negotiating room had been blocked off with curtains so you couldn’t even see anything down there.Speaking of being barred entrance to places, all of the countries have these little delegate centers that are basically boxes with doors where they coordinate and do press conferences. Most countries have the door open and are happy to talk to anyone who is here from their country, Holland invites everyone in and serves all the delegates who are at noon lunch. However if you go by the Canadian one the door is shut and they don’t even like you standing in the area by their door unless you are press and they are giving a press conference.I spent most of the day attending seminars (Green Growth and Green Jobs, Gender and Climate Change, Climate Summit of Mayors, Clean Energy and Climate Action: A North American Collaboration), and between seminars watching some of the leaders speeches which were being broadcast on TVs around the Bella Center. Most of them seemed to have similar themes of action is needed, acting for future generations, and creating a system that made it fair do to whatever their specific concern(s) were.I also had an opportunity at different time during the day to meet and chat very breifly with Jack Layton, Oliva Chow, Elizabeth May and Jean Charest. David McGunity also stopped by the tables we were using as our central meeting place to speak with us for a while.Tomorrow I won’t be in the Bella Center as all NGOs are basically banned for the last two days, I think there’s something ridiculous like 90 passes being given to NGOs so they can actually get in. Today there were a lot of people from NGOs protesting not being let in tomorrow and Friday the restricted access from today and yesterday that only let a third of individuals who were here with NGOs in. For example, for the entire IFLRY delegation of 100 people we got 24 secondary passes that would let people in on Tuesday and Wednesday. The protests were very unhelpful because as soon as they started it meant that they stopped letting anyone from any NGO in so we couldn’t even switch passes with someone else so they could be there in the afternoon after we’d been there in the morning. It may also cause problems for NGOs who want to attend future COPs.
