Tar Sands sit in Op-Ed

Patrick Maloney | Oct 13, 2011

The problem with civil disobedience is that it is a blatant defiance of the “rules” and in a generally moral, law-abiding society like the one we Canadians enjoy, abiding by the rules is ingrained and defiance is seen as counterproductive rebelliousness or mindless insolence perpetrated by misfits or hotheads and not to be countenanced.  But therein lies the conundrum: What happens when the law comes into conflict with the higher moral code that we all share.

Civil disobedience becomes a moral obligation in times of great injustice. It has an honourable history throughout the ages. We in Frontenac had our own local experience with officially sanctioned injustice when the Uranium mining controversy just north of Sharbot Lake boiled over a couple of years ago. The police and the courts supported the entrepreneur to the detriment of the local environment, one person went to jail and the locals were left holding the potentially toxic bag.I engaged in a little civil disobedience myself last week when I took part in the peaceful anti Tar Sands sit-in on Parliament Hill and was arrested and charged with Trespassing and banned from the Hill for a year. The sit-in itself was a remarkably passive non-confrontational affair carefully orchestrated to put the police at ease and assure others that reasonable orderly people could assemble and demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the government without needing to be “kettled” or have their heads busted.

But it was more than just a useless self-aggrandising moment for those who climbed over the barricade. Each one of us was risking being charged with a criminal offence and ending up with a criminal record. It wasn’t until hours after the last disobedient citizen had been seated on the grass in front of the Parliament buildings between the barricade and the line of RCMP that we found out that we were only being charged with trespassing and issued a $65 ticket and a stipulation not to re-enter the Hill for a year.

While some of my fellow protestors were representing native and non-native activist groups, and others were university aged young people, a sizable proportion of both the crowd and the 200 of us who were subsequently arrested were late middle aged individuals like myself, professionals, retirees, grandparents, nary a pony-tailed tie dyed aging hippie in the bunch, more women than men and all at a comfortable stage of their lives where they could easily shrug and say oh well it’s somebody else’s mess to clean up. The four fellows that I eventually shared a paddy wagon with were all older respectable looking types, well dressed, quiet spoken, polite.

So what would make these particular people risk a criminal record to protest at this time? For them it has become obvious that the Tar Sands debacle represents the full litany of everything that has gone wrong with our once vaunted society: environmental degradation, pollution and green house gas emissions on a massive scale, unconscionable profiteering, self serving anti-global warming ideology and the unfettered manipulation of both Federal & Provincial governments by big business. The tipping point is the proposed 3,100-kilometre Keystone XL pipeline slated to transport some 700,000 barrels a day of Tar Sands bitumen to Texas Gulf Coast refineries which will hyper escalate tar sands development. In the wake of the brutal G20 police action, the world financial breakdown and the dogmatic ideological bent of the Harper government, their moral code has been well and truly offended and they are no longer comfortable being silent.

But let’s get back to the “civil disobedience” on Sept 26. This wasn’t anything like the image that Bruce Cockburn’s lyric “You’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight” conjures up.

It was way too polite for that. Way too. . .Canadian, I suppose. Now maybe if two or three thousand people had climbed sedately over the 4-foot barrier to be greeted politely by the RCMP and equally politely refused the request to reconsider-and-climb-back-over-no-harm-done, it might have had some effect. But as it is, the media are playing down what numbers there actually were and the picnic in the park atmosphere diluted the message. Nobody is talking about how Harper shut down access to the Parliament Building during normal business hours, bordered it with 8-foot fences, ringed it with cops (the storm troopers were undoubtedly closeted nearby), positioned snipers and observers on the roof tops and forced the protestors to engage in some theatrics by climbing over the first of a series of four and eight foot fences in front of the Centre Block, all to prevent a petition being hand delivered to Parliament by a group of citizens which included Greenpeace and the Council of Canadians, who had made it known ahead of time in every way possible that their intent was to be peaceful and orderly.

I can only hope that next time, and there will be a next time because Harper can’t seem to resist poking sticks at anyone who isn’t a core supporter, the geezers, the silent majority who have been intimidated by the G20 police actions, will remember Sept 26, 2011 and show up en masse. The police are on their best behaviour when their elders are present. It’s time for the Boomers to stand up and be counted. The young people need our help. We’ve been awfully quiet for the last 40 years and we’ve let a lot get by on our watch. To finish the Cockburn lyric: “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight”. . . even in Canada where what we already have is being chipped away one piece at a time.