The pathetic effort to emulate the OCW protest movement south of the border is rapidly coming to an end in BC’s capital city and will soon be displaced by the imperatives of upcoming Christmas festivities and the installation of an outdoor skating rink.
Lacking a focused message or purpose in the first place, the pointless encampment, now increasingly a hangout for heroin addicts and undesirable street people, likely won’t be missed.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 
The whole thing is just running out of gas.
These guys should go find the Teabaggers and do a Gangs of New York kind of thing. Hollywood could send in camera crews, the price of popcorn would go up and jobs saved for all.
Margaret Wente has a good opinion piece on the circular nature of individual responsibility.
The OCW here in Winnipeg is mostly ignored and consists of a handful of tents in a little-used park down by the legislature. Their “livestream” takes you to someone’s apartment with a few college age kids hanging out and chatting about nothing in particular. Pretty dull stuff.
i saw that video of the Winnipeg interview you posted. Definitely in the shallow end of the pool.
They are kind of wandering in an intellectual wilderness. They need some philosopher king (hobo?) to rally behind. I wonder if we dug up Sartre, or Lenin and propped their bodies against a wall, if that would give them direction?
by the way, I was in the Peg last week attending some meetings.
“The whole thing is just running out of gas.”
the whole thing?
KEvron
KEvron,
point taken. Where and when was that?
Some urban areas of the US are in real rough shape.
Looks like the Port of Oakland to me.
It’s important to make a distinction between the OCW efforts in the States and here in Canada.
that was wednesday afternoon in west oakland. adeline st. overpass, off 3rd st.
that neighborhood is called….acorn industrial! *gasp!*
KEvron
So Red, are you saying that a grouping that has anti-globalization sentiments in Canada is less justifiable than the ostensibly same anti-globazlization movement in the USA? Or that the worldwide #occupy movement is someone different by region?
While the list of litanies that the Canadian factions maybe less “important”, it is still refreshing that the movement has been as strong for so long – even in the face of the upcoming winter.
There is an irony that the people in Victoria will be moved to make room for the ritual of orgiastic x-mas consumerism celebrations. While you call it “pointless”, one would hope that it will lead to a movement of some kind and does show the resolve of some to at least get a message out.
Calgary mayor Nenshi seems to show some comprehension of the situation (and is quite amusing in his exchange with perennial loser Werner Patels)…
http://twitter.com/#!/nenshi
CW,
So you think the “Öccupy” movement is both important and “refreshing”? How so?
In the US and Europe we have some sersious deprivation. In Canada it has been Union and anti-democrats who are still mad they didn’t get their way last election. People like Brigittee DePape. We still have to live in a civil society that has rules and expectations of the citizens.
If myself and 100 random friends camped out in a downtown park how long do you think it would take for the local constabulary to evict us? I am having trouble separating my analogy with some Union activists and disgruntled anti-globalization protesters.
Tomm, you are an idiot. Trotting out hackneyed stereotypes based on SunTV propaganda does not service your arguments. Care to start over?
Gosh, you’re calling names, who would have thought!
What is “refreshing” about the Canadian version? How is a bunch of homeless people and “me too” globalization protesters hanging out at Starbucks telling us something deep about our governance?
It simply isn’t. I’m actually surprised the media is still covering this stuff.
Tomm is a shortsighted dupe. Canadians are stupidly complacent (can anyone in Ontario still believe in Free-Trade?), but as the jobless rolls grow longer in Ontario we will see what will happen to OWS in Canada.
The West will not care, as we complacently dig shit out of the ground – which is okay, as long as commodity prices stay high. If they do not, the Rednecks will blame Ottawa. (like they blame the NEP for the 1980;s when any sentient human being knows the real culprit was high-interest rates driving uncertainty in a long position in Oil & Gas …)
Canadians are at one and the same time, the smartest and dumbest people on Earth.
A the Y,
Short sighted dupe is better than idiot. Thank you for that.
If Free Trade is to blame, then be prepared to put that argument into the public discourse.
Please tell me what will happen when the US, EU, China, and yes, Canada all think it is acceptable to put significant barriers to trade that benefits their country specifically?
Argue this…if we put up trade walls we will soon look all like Burma. Smuggling will become the new growth industry. Environmental protection? social safety net? everything will flush when there is global desperation for food, currency, goods and services.
7 Billion people???
Years back, there was talk of the western provinces separating from the east. Back then that was horrifying. Canadian people were also against Quebec separating from the rest of Canada. Now I believe the separation of the west and east, would have been for the better.
Canada is a huge country and BC is a vast distance from Ottawa. The west doesn’t have the population to win concessions, they don’t even have to count the west’s votes. They say, the west would be 40% better off. Look what is happening to the Canadian Wheat Board. Harper wants to control absolutely everything. I read, Harper is a Neo-Nazi, a Reformer. He founded the Northern Foundation Party, and the skinheads helped Harper with the organization. This was back in 1989.
Canada is not safe with Harper. If you read: Harper gives a speech in New York, at The Council of Foreign Relations. Sept 25/2007. He made his evil agenda, blatantly clear. You can also read: Harper gives a speech on Global Governance for Canada.
The west has, grain farms, cattle ranches, market gardens, orchards, mines, fishing, BC has vast natural resources and so does Alberta. The west’s tax dollars, would stay in the west. That way, we could be self sufficient. I believe the territories wanted to come in with the west. Chretien even said, he didn’t like the people from the west. Well we didn’t like him either.
Our young Canadian boys were blown to bits, during WW11. We didn’t want fascism and dictatorship in Canada. Quite frankly, Harper wasn’t worth dying for.
GJW,
Wow!
I don’t know what to say. I looked up some links and there is deep drilling going on here. William Aberhart… White supremacy… Nazi’s… Conspiracy… racism… and it all seems to be coming from “a friend of a friend”.
I am quite sure the politicians and their governments got the message.
We Canadians are fed up with our tax dollars, being thieved and given to the giant corporations. Harper gave banks, mines, large company’s, oil and gas corporations. billions of our tax dollars. I saw that motion pass, while watching the House of Commons TV channel. Harper also gave them, ANOTHER tax reduction, as soon a he won his majority, which was a skeptical win, by a lot of Canadians opinions.
Harper had a many times convicted American felon working for him. Felon Carson and his ex prostitute girlfriend were guests in Harper’s home. The robocalls to confuse Canadians voting location, came out of North Dakota, of the good old U.S.A. Hmmmm.
Harper is the worst P.M. Canada has ever known. He is out for his own selfish goals. He has no control what-so-ever, on the spending accounts. ONE member spent three million dollars, for just traveling expenses. Our tax dollars are just a free for all. Fifty million dollars went missing. And the worst abuser is, Harper himself. Billions and billions spent on wars, we have no right to be in. ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, has Harper under investigation for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
There are Billions to be wasted on, jets, military ships, armored vehicles, a nuclear submarine, stalag’s and the most stupid of all, a billion dollar fake lake. Canada is in a recession, that is about to get much worse. Harper’s spending isn’t sustainable. The gigantic corporations, should be paying their fair share of taxes. Retroactive, since Harper has been in office. I would love to hear them squeal at their trough.
I can’t speak for all Western Canadians GJW, but this Western Canadian would be happy with a bit less of your tin foil blowing around
CWF: I’m not saying that many of the issues being raised by the various OCW protests here in Canada aren’t legitimate concerns, but I seriously doubt the globalization of trade and capital that has evolved over the last 30+ years (for better or worse) is going to be reversed in any way by a tiny group of people voicing their complaints whilst camped out in public parks.
Here in Winnipeg, the litany of grievances include the lack of “social justice” (whatever that means) and the fact that we have unacceptable levels of “urban child and family poverty”… Yet this in a province that’s had an NDP government for the last decade and was just re-elected with a sizable majority, so it’s not like these incredibly complex (and I would argue largely intractable) socio-economic problems aren’t trying to be addressed (however ineffectively). What good does it do to complain when you have absolutely no solutions and don’t even seem to fully grasp the nature of the problems? You know, other than to make you feel self-righteous.
One of their complaints is that the Harper government is dismantling the Canadian Wheat Board… Seriously? Are middle-class kids really worried about the ramifications of not having a single-desk for the marketing of wheat in the western Canadian provinces — never mind the fact that it doesn’t exist in the rest of the country?
It’s good that people are talking about these things, but we do actually have a fairly viable political system in which to so – one that, unlike our friends in America, isn’t totally corrupted by money. And yet the people involved in the protest don’t get engaged, participate or even bother to vote most of the time, so I’m a little perplexed at what they expect their fuzzy and inchoate discontent to produce…
GJ: Yeah, I remember living in Alberta during the time when the notion of western separatism (and its most notable exponent, the WCC) gained some prominence in the political discourse. On the west coast, there was the idea of forming “Cascadia” a bloc of states and provinces with supposedly common interests that would split off from federal ties to both Canada and the USA. Those were strange times.
What good does it do to complain when you have absolutely no solutions and don’t even seem to fully grasp the nature of the problems?
Well, that is question I have been asking myself when it comes to post-modern discourse. If Progressives have the albatross of not going beyond their sixties and seventies style rhetoric, the Neo-Conservatives (Tea-Baggers included) will have to update their multiple permutations of their Randist, neo-liberal platitudes.
Anyway, as I have mentioned before, the fractured nature of post-modern discourse has resulted in the perpetual expectation that each manifestation of populist opinion has to have some sort of agenda attached. I find this self-serving in a very mutual, universal sense though: By having an agenda, movements or expressions of populist discontent can be categorized, marginalized, and imprinted a set of assumptions that are taken as fact. This means that when it comes to operating in the political arena, there is the expectation that policy development will be best served in a strange, Darwinian sense where one triumphs over the other. There is no synthesis, despite how many times people appeal to Hegel. The extent at which such movements can engage in entryist style political participation is seen as a virtue. To nihilists and cynics like me, I can appreciate the effectiveness, but this does nothing against actually addressing serious problems any better than a populist expression of anger with no stated agenda. Applying a moral pressure free from the usual trappings of post-modern political discourse, I think, can be beneficial, and the reason why the Tea-Baggers, Fox News, and even their usual enemies are reacting to OWS as they are: OWS is not willing to play the usual game, and thus, they are not used to dealing with this type of populist anger.
“Meantime, at Starbucks business is up, because the corporate coffee shop has become an unlikely but popular nighttime Occupy Victoria hangout.”
???