Feb 13th #ShutDownCanada protest gains momentum
CALLOUT for communities across Canada to blockade their local railway, port or highway on February 13th. Don't buy, don't fly, no work and keep the kids home from school. A diversity of tactics is highly recommended! Get everyone involved. The goal is to significantly impact the Canadian economy for a day and demand there be an independent inquiry into the 2000+ cases of missing or murdered indigenous women. It's Time to #ShutDownCanada.
Get together with your friends and family to start planning now. Please share any info on local events on this event page we will use as a networking hub. Tell as many people as you can, time to get the ball rolling.
Here are links for local events created so far.
Feb 13th #ShutDownCanada protest gains momentum
The Two Row Times recently caught up with some of the organizers of the February 13th nation wide day of action to #ShutDownCanada. Momentum for this day is growing, as almost 5000 people have now joined the Facebook group, 51,000 people have been invited to attend the event, and hundreds more have joined the groups in each of their respective cities. Last week’s story on #ShutDownCanada on the TRT website gathered more than 60,000 views in under a week, making it one of our most popular stories....
https://www.tworowtimes.com/news/national/feb-13th-shutdowncanada-protes...
Have heard very little about it here, and haven't seen anything in French. There's an event in Kahnewake. Seems very decentralized, which I guess is good, but I'm really not sure how it's being presented to allies and what our role is supposed to be.
Probably different elsewhere in Canada. It always is.
I shall try to inform myself!
[url=http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/krystalline-kraus/2015/01/shutdowncanada... Kraus: #ShutDownCanada Updated[/url]
The blog post is 3 weeks old, and all the links are to Facebook. I can't figure out from the Montréal link when and where the action is, other than Kahnewake. QPIRG Concordia has joined, so maybe I'll ask them.
Isn't Feb. 14 supposed to be a day of action for Missing and Murdered Women?
Isn't Feb. 14 supposed to be a day of action for Missing and Murdered Women?
..yes it is unionist. there has been criticism re the planning of the #ShutDown event. there are attempts to rectify this to some extent but it has caused confusion.
Protest will draw attention to missing and murdered native women
Hamilton is one of 22 places that will be targeted during the ShutDownCanada protest Feb. 13.
A group plans to occupy the intersection of King and Main streets, near Gage Park, between 2 p.m. and dusk next Friday.
The aim of the protest is to again draw attention to a demand for the federal government to call an inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women. The RCMP says the total, since 1980, is about 1,200. The Conservative government believes the issue is a law enforcement matter.
Organizer Kawaowene (John) Garlow from Six Nations could not be reached for comment Thursday, but in a Facebook posting he noted "kkkanda" offered money and assistance when 300 Nigerians went missing.
"It seems the native women of turtle island (sic) are looked upon by kkkanda as less than human," he said....
http://www.thespec.com/news-story/5325707-protest-will-draw-attention-to...
Unless I'm mistaken, today was mostly a no-show. Some have expressed concern that the only real effect will be more police presence at #MMIW actions tomorrow. Too bad.
Very severe criticism in social media of this campaign. Many are speaking of the lessons to be learned.
#Shutdown Canada Causes Minor Economic Disruption
#Shutdown Canada actions have taken place in some 23 cities and towns across the country with the intention of causing economic disruption. The action was called by grassroots Natives and organized primarily through social media to highlight the cases of over 2,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women.
On one of the main Facebook event pages for #Shutdown Canada, over 7,000 people indicated they would be attending. But on the day, the numbers of people participating across the country probably did not even reach 700. The Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) reported on the protests with the rather uninspiring headline “So-called Shutdown Canada protest fails to live up to its name.”
https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/shutdown-canada-cau...
Speaking of the cops, the protesters in Regina tried to block a railway crossing and used a device to try and drop the crossing arm. According the fellow who did it, the cops were on them right away, knew exactly what he was trying to do, and stopped it from working.
No charges of sabotage; they let him go with a warning, though they said he would bbe charged if he did it again.
Very severe criticism in social media of this campaign. Many are speaking of the lessons to be learned.
Forgot to mention - the twitter feed I linked to above belongs to rabble.ca blogger Chelsey Vowel, blogging as âpihtawikosisân.
Very severe criticism in social media of this campaign. Many are speaking of the lessons to be learned.
I liked the sentiment of the campaign, as expressed in its slogan (not sure if there was more to it) but what were they hoping for on three weeks' notice?
A sober analysis, I think:
[url=http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/krystalline-kraus/2015/02/shutdowncanada... and the impact of online activism[/url]
Now getting back to ShutDownCanada, this initiative mostly lived and spread online with little to no face-to-face contact meetings between activists (Vancouver excluded here as their shut the port action had several planning meetings and obvious, was thus the most successful of the ShutDownCanada rallies).
And I feel it was this lack of face-to-face relationship and community building that failed to bind the ShutDownCanada action to a political movement. Online commitment to attend an action is very different than personal accountability.
In some cities, literally no one or one or two people showed up and there were people posting to the various Facebook pages asking where all the people who had signed up had gone . Here is a pretty unflattering article about what occurred in Regina.
Another issue was timing.
Some Indigenous community members felt the timing of February 13 was a crass move since the day before was the annual--sometimes going on for twenty years in British Columbia--vigil for murdered and missing Indigenous women.
The fear was that the ShutDownCanada event the day before would, steal the thunder of the established Indigenous-led vigils that take place across Canada and the United States every year. A reporter for the Toronto Media Coop informed the ShutDownCanada Toronto organizers that leadership from Six Nations were not willing to endorse the demonstration and were actively encouraging people to not attend on February 13 and put their focus instead on the time-honoured vigils the day after.
After all, the event on February 13 stated aim was to bring attention to the, "2000+ cases of missing or murdered indigenous women" which is exactly the focus of the February 14 vigils.
So maybe part of the friction, too, was a matter of tactics. Calling for a vigil is a very different thing than calling for the total shutdown of business as usual in Canada.