Factbox-South Korea tightens security ahead of Yoon impeachment ruling
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea is bracing for a potentially violent public reaction to a Constitutional Court ruling on Friday on whether to remove impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol from office or reinstate him amid the country's worst political crisis in decades.
The following are some of the security measures being taken in and around the Constitutional Court in central Seoul and elsewhere in the capital.
THE COURT
A 150-metre (164-yard) stretch of a four-lane street in front of the court will be closed to cars and pedestrians, with several layers of police buses parked bumper to bumper along both sides of the road and their wheels chained.
A 1.85 km (1.15 mile) radius around the court has been declared a no-fly zone for Friday with equipment deployed to disable drones.
The eight justices of the court already have security protection and the acting president has directed the police to step up protection for them.
POLICE
The police have warned of zero tolerance for any illegal activities related to the court decision, following a mob rampage at another court after it approved a warrant for Yoon's detention on January 26.
Authorities were also caught off guard by the violent protest following the ruling ousting former President Park Geun-hye in 2017, when four Park supporters were killed and scores injured, including police.
More than 14,000 police officers will be mobilised throughout Seoul. They have been authorised to use pepper spray and batons if needed. South Korean police have unofficially stopped using tear gas and water cannon for crowd control after deaths in past protests.
CLOSURES
The 11 schools and kindergartens within a 1 km radius of the court will be closed all day on Friday.
National museums near the court and three royal palaces that are popular tourist destinations including the Gyeongbokgung and the UNESCO World Heritage Changdeokgung will be closed to the public on Friday and possibly other days if needed.
The U.S. embassy in South Korea said routine consular operations such as visa interviews would be cancelled on Friday and advised Americans to exercise caution around crowds and rallies.
TRAFFIC, CROWDS
In parts of Seoul and elsewhere in the country hundreds of thousands of people are expected to turn out for opposing rallies. Authorities say some of central Seoul's main thoroughfares may be closed to traffic.
The Seoul subway's Anguk station, which is near the court, will be closed all day and trains will not stop there.
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'That pipeline produces a product that goes into international markets and the money comes back to Canada and we put it into health care, education, roads, bridges, tunnels and whatever else,' Manley said. 'Imagine what we could do with more of the above.' Dreaming of a future full of new pipelines can steal attention away from some of the more upbeat and unsung productivity stories in the present day. If Canada were to appoint a chief storyteller to convey these yarns, Linda Hasenfratz, chair of auto-parts manufacturing giant Linamar Corp., should get the nod. She's the type of person who can look at a 'drop of water in a glass and see it as half full,' one person who knows her well said. Hasenfratz is also the type of executive who uses charts and graphs to hammer home points during an interview. Topping her list of key takeaways is that Linamar has boosted its productivity by 100 per cent over the past 15 years. Over the same timeframe, the Canadian manufacturing sector as a whole improved its productivity by about 50 per cent, which, perhaps surprisingly, outpaced the U.S. sector's gains. Linamar has 75 plants worldwide and ranks its Canadian ones as its most productive. Toyota Motor Corp.'s Canadian plants are its best performers, according to auto industry analyst J.D. Power, and General Motors Co.'s facility in Oshawa, Ont., consistently ranks as its top factory in North America. In other words, Canadian operations are competing and appear to be crushing it. But one obstacle to that dynamic showing up on Canada's bottom line is government, Hasenfratz said. Nearly one per cent of all Canadians are federal employees. Between 2010 and 2023, the government's headcount grew by 26 per cent. More than 2.5 million Canadians worked for not-for-profit organizations in 2023, according to government statistics. Combined, Hasenfratz said that means far too many well-educated Canadians are working in areas that do not make a dime. 'We need to get more people into revenue-generating businesses and that would have an enormous positive impact on productivity,' she said. Hasenfratz also pointed out that the stories we choose to tell about ourselves matter. 'When you hear things like Canada is not productive, that is not very inspiring, and it doesn't make you think, 'Damn, I'm going to get in there and be more productive tomorrow,'' she said. 'But if you see an example of a company that has doubled its productivity over the past 15 years and in doing so has gained business, grown profit and realized a great return on investment, then you'll be like, 'I want to do that,' because that is inspiring.' Trevor Tombe, a University of Calgary economics professor, recognizes Canada is awash with unrealized potential, but said there are issues in trying to realize those gains. Let's imagine Hasenfratz and her manufacturing sector pals, oil producers and agriculturists are all able to generate more of what the world wants for export — especially to destinations other than the U.S. All that stuff would need to get loaded into massive container ships at the ports of Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax. But the Port of Vancouver is already the largest on the North American West Coast and is handling record levels of cargo. An expansion that has been in the works since 2013 will not be completed until sometime in the 2030s. Montreal got the ball rolling on its port expansion in 2018, but it's still in progress and a long ways away. 'If you want to sell a good to another country beyond the United States, you are not doing it by truck or rail; you're doing it by port because there's an ocean in the way,' Tombe said. 'Right now, we don't have any excess port capacity that would allow us to trade much more with other countries, and in terms of a construction timeline in Vancouver, it is plausibly 20 years from start to finish.' If Canada is unable to get its goods moving, diversify its trade partners, grow exports to China, Japan, South Korea, India and so on, the U.S. is left as the only option. That is not a great position to be in when negotiating a new trade deal with Donald Trump. One option is to build ports elsewhere, such as the Arctic. There currently isn't a deepwater port to speak of there, but there's been plenty of talk of building one — some day. 'There is not just economic and productivity implications of bad federal policy around infrastructure, but national security implications,' Tombe said. Another area in need of a makeover that does not require anything more complicated and time-consuming than playing around with some accounting software datasets is tax policy. Small businesses, defined as companies with less than 500 employees, employ almost 50 per cent of the labour force. But they don't make capital investments in machinery and equipment at the same levels as Canada's G7 peers, apart from the Italians, who invest even less. A worker who lacks the latest tools is not as productive as the worker who does. Companies that retool an assembly line, upgrade laptops and arm staff with best-in-class gadgets are able to write off the expenditures over a number of years, but that 'delays the value' of the tax deductions, Tombe said. Were a company able to write off the new laptops in one fell swoop at the time of purchase, well, now we would be talking, he said, and the conversation would lead to an environment where companies are encouraged to reinvest today. 'It is a way to cut corporate taxes on new investment while maintaining corporate taxes on companies as a whole, so it's less costly than just dropping the corporate tax rate itself,' he said. That may seem an easy thing to do, and the same goes for another productivity fix that relates to Canada's secret weapon: immigrants. Walid Hejazi, an economics professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, meets a lot of them, and he said the old joke about the backseat of a taxi being the safest place to have a heart attack still holds up, though the taxi-driving doctor from abroad today is probably behind the wheel of an Uber. Hejazi, through the university, works with a group of immigrant women who all have university degrees from another country. They are smart, savvy and eager to become productive new Canadians. 'Do you know what the No. 1 job these women get offered is?' he said. 'Serving coffee at Tim Hortons.' Rotman puts the newcomers through a crash micro-business course. If successfully completed, that earns them a micro-credential from the school, which hopefully catches the eye of an artificial intelligence employment screener and gets them a face-to-face interview with another human. 'The goal here is to match the women with jobs that are more commensurate with their skills,' he said. As for being compared to the U.S., he said being neighbours has been a gift. We share the same language and customs, generally get along and find it easy to do business with one another to the extent that Canada's ho-hum productivity level has not been a handicap. But where it starts to be a big problem is when the U.S. closes for business and Canadian companies are forced to win market share abroad. 'It is relatively easy for a Canadian company to do business in the U.S., and it requires productivity at a given level,' he said. 'But to go to Europe and Asia and compete requires a much higher productivity level.' Canada may be having a productivity 'emergency,' but its productivity is improving, just at a slower rate than other countries with similar attributes. That is partly why Frances Donald gets the urge to 'vent' when she speaks about productivity, since obsessing over the numbers can obscure a more fundamental question: What kind of Canada do Canadians aspire to? 'You could conceive a plan that would mechanically boost our productivity number,' she said. 'But it wouldn't actually make the Canadian economy better for most Canadians.' For example, not all those productivity-sapping public-sector employees are administrators pushing paper around. They are also teachers, cops, wildfire fighters and doctors. Close to 20 per cent of Canadians have already ticked past age 65, and odds are that a care facility is in their future at some point. 'If I told you that we could quadruple the number of high-productivity engineers, but we dramatically reduce the number of doctors and that would result in higher productivity statistics, then you might hear Canadians say, 'Could I please pick the health-care workers over the high-productivity engineer?'' Donald said. Economists have spent a decade highlighting Canada's productivity ills, from internal trade barriers to reduced investment in the natural resource sector to an affordable housing crisis that only gets worse by the year. It is a drumbeat of doom that can overshadow what Canada has, chiefly, a highly educated population, a massive breadbasket of agricultural goods, oil and gas and critical minerals galore and plenty of room for the world's best and brightest who may be keen to sign on. 'In Canada, we don't have to ask what we are going to bake out of nothing because we already have a long list of something,' Donald said. 'Our project is to have a collective understanding of what this country has been blessed in, from things in the ground to our incredibly high level of education — spanning from goods to a blossoming services sector. Canada is not short on the ingredients to build a powerful economy; where we have fallen short is on the execution.' • Email: joconnor@
