Citizen’s group occupies MP’s office in Perth over RCMP and Wet’suwet’en

Feb 19, 2020

30 activists occupied the offices of Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston MP Scott Reid in Perth on Friday afternoon (February 14), between noon and 4pm. The activists were hoping that Reid’s staff would be able to arrange for a phone call with Reid from his office at Parliament Hill.

Reid was not in his office, however. He was in British Columbia for family reasons and was not available, so the protestors stayed until 4pm. They did meet with Lanark Frontenac Kingston MPP Randy Hillier, who shares office space with Reid, when he arrived at 3pm.

The protest was instigated by Anna Stewart, who said she decided to heed “the call out from the Wet’suwet’en for solidarity actions.”

She contacted her friend, Satinka Shilling, who was the NDP candidate in the most recent Federal election, and they began a Facebook thread to plan a peaceful occupation of Reid’s office.

“We know that Scott Reid is pro-pipeline, but we wanted to ask him if he feels he can justify the actions of the RCMP when the supreme court has said that the hereditary chiefs have jurisdiction over the land that the RCMP is seeking to remove them from. We did not get to ask him about that last week, but we will tomorrow,” she said, in a phone interview on Tuesday night (February 18th).

“My ask will be that he take a stand. I don’t see how he can argue that he is against Indigenous rights.”

Stewart did end up engaging with Randy Hillier last Friday, “even though I told him that we were not actually there to engage with him on this, because it is a federal matter. ”

On Monday, Hillier published a statement on his website and publicised it on twitter. The statement calls for an end to the Indian Act, which many indigenous people and their supporters agree with, but he also said some other things.

He said that “small groups of radical, privileged and dishonest idealogues are attempting to derail Canadian society.”

Stewart does not know if Hillier was referring to her, or to the other members of the group that occupied Hillier’s office on Friday.

She said that her motivation for action in this matter comes from her convictions about the rule of law.

“What’s driving us to act is our engagement with the issues. We all occupy the land that we inhabit, and we see what is going on in the ancestral Wet’suwet’en lands and we know that it is illegal to ask a police force to remove people from land that they have the legal right to occupy. This is not about our privilege,” she said, “it is about respect for the legal rights.”

In his posting, Hillier took exception to the groups that he says have “successfully stifled our freedom of speech through coercive political correctness, distorted our education, rewritten our history, abused freedom of assembly,”.

He also challenged the idea that Indigenous peoples in Canada have been victimised by European settlers.

“Neither I, any of my ancestors, nor the vast majority of my fellow Canadians have oppressed the Indigenous peoples of Canada. My ancestors and the history of Canada demonstrates beyond any doubt that consensus, not conquest, was the relationship between the European settlers and the native Canadians. Just as new Canadians arriving today, the first European settlers came here to flee injustice, religious persecution, and poverty in their own countries; and through these struggles, mistakes, and corrections, we have this great nation. We are all Canadians and no one deserves a pejorative label regardless if they have been here two days or two hundred years.

Anna Stewart said that after reading Hillier’s statement she is concerned about the fact that Hillier glossed over the actions of successive governments.

“I worry that people will see what he wrote and become emboldened by it. I worry that people will say this is about a small group of radicals, even though 10,000 people protested in Toronto on Monday. This is really about the Wet’suwet’en and their struggle to assert their rights. That is what we are focussing on.”