Activist Brigette DePape was a page in the Canadian Senate when she came to the attention of the public on June 3, 2011 by a protest she made during the first throne speech of the majority government of Stephen Harper. By silently holding up a sign that said “Stop Harper!” she earned dismissal from her job, the media nickname “the rogue page,” and the admiration of Canadians concerned with the undemocratic, ideologically extreme tendencies of the Harper government.

DePape has produced an extensive essay for the Council of Canadians on how we can be more engaged in political life and activism. rabble.ca is reprinting the essay in five parts, with part four running today. Links to parts one, two, and three are below.

Stephen Harper’s agenda is part of a broader, global neo-liberal agenda. This agenda allows Canada to extract the dirtiest oil on Earth, pollute our air and water, and speed up climate change. It has been built on false assumptions that allow short-term economic gains to come before the long-term sustainability of our communities. It allows the profits of a few individuals to come before our collective well-being. It is the job of social movements — of us — not only to expose these false assumptions, but to challenge them.

When I first came to Ottawa, I denied the reality that the crises we face are political and systematic in nature. Despite knowing better, I did this because I did not see solutions to these broad problems and this made me feel helpless. I blamed other causes in order to be comforted by the illusion that taking shorter showers, giving to humanitarian NGOs, or voting was enough to change these realities. At the other extreme, after acknowledging the structural problems with our society, I felt as though the system was so corrupt that the only option was to disengage completely from politics.

Now I am honest with myself about the real and interwoven root causes of the many crises our society faces, from colonialism to patriarchy to neo-liberalism. I feel empowered knowing that social movements can confront these systems of power.

How is it that we have a prime minister that the majority of Canadians did not vote for? This can only result from a broken political system. Non-violent direct can challenge the deficient liberal democracy model and the faulty first-past-the-post voting system that allowed Harper to become our prime minister in the first place.

However, those in power make it appear as if the current model, the status quo, is not only inevitable, but unchangeable. In reality, the status quo is malleable. I now see that it is our job to change it.

Once again, I am inspired by the UK Uncut movement which has orchestrated many direct actions to challenge the status quo. The dominant narrative in the U.K. purports that social services must be cut in order to control a deficit during an economic crisis. The UK Uncut movement takes creative action to challenge this assertion, revealing that the problem is not a lack of money, but a problem with how money is being spent. To show that the billions of dollars wasted on bailing out banks should instead be used for social programming, community members occupied banks and set up mock daycares beside ATMs. Their action cleverly sent the message that banks were the only space left to read to their children given the cuts to daycares. By challenging the status quo in a public space they were able to challenge the beliefs of those who may not otherwise question the status quo.

I am also inspired by actions taken by the environmental justice movement, including at last year’s climate negotiations in Cancun. People have been deceived to think that the impacts of climate change will be felt in the far-off future. Youth climate activists exposed the truth that people are suffering the effects of climate change right now, most of whom come from the Global South. They are the least responsible for climate change, but suffer the most from it. Climate activists revealed this truth by mourning the 21,000 people who died due to climate change in the time between UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen and those in Cancun the following year. People directly impacted by climate change told their real-life stories of loved ones who had died. For example, an Indigenous woman spoke about her friends who died from cancer caused by extractive industry. Her story, and the community members and activists working in solidarity with her, made the issue impossible to deny.

Drawing inspiration from the Arab Spring

I’ve been awakened by the Arab Spring; by my peers rising up for democracy in North Africa and in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life took over Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt to demand fundamental democratic changes.

What started the uprisings in Egypt? This is the question author Rebecca Solnit asks in Charting the Wild Winds of Change in 2011. When did the injustices that were accepted for decades become unacceptable? When did fear subside and indignation take over to create collective action? Was it when Khaled Said, a young Egyptian man, revealed corruption from police forces and was killed for it? A Facebook page was subsequently made for him that stated: “We are all Khaled Said.” Was it when rap artist El General posted a song about the expansive poverty and injustice in Egypt? Was it when another young person gave confidential reports to Wikileaks to reveal human rights violations by the U.S. military and who was subsequently arrested? The rise of people power in Egypt is not due to a single act, but was catalyzed by a mood that, together, these acts created. 

I am honoured to have since received a message from young activists there supporting a Canadian grassroots uprising, affirming that Harper must be stopped and that Canada needs its own Arab Spring; that we truly need a “Canadian Spring.”

My peers from Egypt have in fact called for a “World Spring” — a flowering of social movements worldwide that will address whatever ills exist in each respective country. 

Discovering the rich tradition of direct action in Canada

Since my action, it has been exciting to discover that there is a tradition of people taking action in Canada to challenge the status quo and unjust governments. Unlike throne speeches, community activism and people power is a tradition that I can identify with.

Canada has had a long and vibrant history of civil disobedience with people using direct actions for a myriad of issues — from labour rights, to Indigenous sovereignty, to rights for French-speaking people. Some of the most well-known examples come from Greenpeace, an environmental organization started in Canada in the 1970s to resist the overlapping injustices of war and environmental degradation. By sailing boats into nuclear test areas to stop detonations, staging sit-ins and peaceful occupations, and placing boats in the path of whaling ships, Greenpeace has found creative ways to raise awareness and stop injustices.

People in Canada have often used people power to defend our collective rights. Indeed, it is thanks to the bold actions of workers who withdrew their labour during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike that we enjoy many of the employment standards that we have today. When institutional routes failed workers, and city council refused labourers’ request for a wage increase, workers united to demand fair working conditions. While companies enjoyed large profits on military contracts during the First World War, labourers made abysmal wages and faced unbearable working conditions. As 6,800 workers from 13 different trades joined together to form the largest general strike in Canada’s history, they made it clear that they would not accept oppressive working conditions. Continuing to strike after city council tried to ban them from doing so, they won public support and set the political climate for labour reforms — from collective bargaining rights to union recognition. These hard-won rights continue to be essential in the struggle for fair wages and working standards today. The strike laid the groundwork for a “wellspring of social legislation.”

Another great example of the progress that can be achieved through people power comes from the labour movement’s “On To Ottawa” trek of the 1930s. Workers from western Canada rallied to voice their concerns about unemployment relief camps established by the federal government in the height of the Depression. Their demands included pay increases and changes to the deplorable working conditions. But R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government refused to listen. The labourers bravely withdrew their labour and fled Vancouver by train in an original kind of strike. United, they made their way to Ottawa where they would file a complaint with the federal government to demand better working conditions. Weathering police violence in Regina, they gained mass public support as they traveled the country. Despite the government’s attempts to repress them, their action was key to exposing injustices of the Bennett government and eventually toppling his majority, making way for a government more amenable to civil society demands. A strengthened labour movement was subsequently able to pressure the new government to abolish the camps.

Today, we see the Harper government attempting to undermine organized labour (which should be considered as a testimony to labour’s strength.) A clear illustration of Harper’s anti-union agenda was his decision to ignore the collective bargaining rights of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. When recent negotiations led Canada Post Corporation (CPC) management to lock out workers, Harper, at the behest of CPC management, intervened to end the deadlock and his government passed back-to-work legislation that ignored workers’ rights to represent their interests at the bargaining table. Despite Harper’s efforts to thwart their union, CUPW has only gained strength through this struggle, and continues to organize to build an even more powerful worker’s movement.

As we have seen, movements in Canada have been somewhat unconnected from one another historically — worker’s movements from environmental movements and so forth. My hope for Canada lies in the joining together of these social movements in order to gain greater strength.

In the fifth and final instalment of activist Brigette DePape’s essay, which runs in rabble.ca on Wednesday, Sept. 28, she looks at building an intergenerational movement. This article is part of an essay that was published by The Council of Canadians. It can be read in full here.

Part one — Thinking outside the ballot box: Stop Harper

Part two — Thinking outside the ballot box: Democracy means involvement

Part three — Stop Harper: Moving beyong the Hill and using people power