A montage of media coverage in the aftermath of Sean and Shireen's Climate Justice protest. Courtesy of Shit Harper Did.
On January 6th, during a public event at the Vancouver Board of Trade where Stephen Harper was set to conduct a supposedly softball Q&A session, climate justice advocates Sean Devlin and Shireen Soofi (from No One Is Illegal) hopped on stage after sneaking past security, dressed as catering staff for the event, and held up signs like “Climate Justice Now”—side by side with the Prime Minster, a powerful man who spends tens of millions of dollars of the public’s money on his security detail. This disruption caused an immense amount of media attention that focused on the lack of security for the Prime Minster, while the protestors’ proximity to the Prime Minster was described as “spitting distance,” “striking distance,” and “stabbing distance” by various media outlets.
Ultimately, while the apparent lack of reliable protection for our country’s leader is a concerning issue, the underlying story to this disruption is climate change itself; along with the growing discontent and dissent in Canada for the politics of a government that appears to favour short-term economic gain over long-term environmental protection. While Sean and Shireen’s disruption was able to start this conversation in small circles, the conservative media machine pushed a separate agenda to discredit the action.
A day after the disruption, in an act of pathetically biased gotcha-journalism, Sun News’ Jerry Agar called the protest’s coordinator—Brigette DePape from Shit Harper Did—without any pre-warning and placed her live on the air early in the morning. While Brigette eloquently defended the protest’s purpose and the climate justice cause, despite being put on the spot on live television, Jerry slammed her on air for being “not very willing to have a conversation” after she hung up. I’m sure if I called Jerry at his house and livestreamed the conversation, told him he was live on the air, then asked him to discuss why he was placing climate justice activists in that unfair position, he wouldn’t have a very polite response. Nor would Sun News ever place a Conservative politician, or an energy industry employee, in the same boat.
Beyond Sun News’ embarrassing interview tactics, Bob Runciman, a Conservative Senator, stated that Sean and Shireen “should face indictable offences with serious fines and/or imprisonment.” Further, Runciman claims he will be pushing an agenda to establish “new laws to deter similar future protest.” Attitudes like this are incredibly dangerous for the future of a country where people should be able to freely protest a government that apparently allows its secretive surveillance agency to spy on behalf of the energy industry, while Stephen Harper has publicly declared that the job of extraction from the Alberta oil sands—the land Neil Young likened to Hiroshima—would be an epic undertaking akin to the pyramids or the Great Wall of China.
Limiting the population’s right to protest and demonstrate radical, anti-government attitudes damages the cornerstone of successful, revolutionary movements; and these actions and privileges have been greatly neutered in North America, post-9/11. One of the greatest casualties of the mysterious, hyper-Orwellian surveillance state that we now live under is its iron-fisted approach to protest and dissent. If you, one day, want to demonstrate in a similar fashion to Shireen and Sean, you’re now in a society where everything you’ve said and done for the past few years is likely recorded somewhere—whether online, in public social media channels, or clandestinely, in government data centres. Meaning, if you suddenly fall under the microscope of government or mainstream media outlets that act as instruments of the state, your entire personal history and background can be called into question.
This isn’t conspiracy or fantasy; it’s how activists are discredited on a regular basis. Case in point, the Vancouver Sun recently reported that the federal Tories were able to “connect the dots” on Sean Devlin’s past as a supporter for the Vision Party in Vancouver that is currently running City Hall; this paranoid dot-connecting is alleging that the party was somehow behind the disruption, and is therefore using its political clout to damage the Harper Government out west. Geoff Meggs, a city councilor for Vision in Vancouver, called a spade a spade when he described this allegation as a “neurotic conspiracy theory,” but it indicates the level to which a protestor can and will be smeared in Canada for his or her political action.
Since this disruption, Shit Harper Did—an activist group that grew out of a website started during the last federal election by comedians and political advocates alike to inform the public of the shitty things Stephen Harper has buried on his resume—started a petition for “direct action.” Meaning they are looking for people to pledge that they’ll conduct similar disruptions or protests against the Harper government that will put them at risk for arrest. At the time of this writing, they have 295 pledges out of their goal of 500.
I called Sean Devlin yesterday to speak to him about the disruption, as well as the media reaction since he was able to protest alongside a pensive Prime Minister on stage in Vancouver. He told me he wasn’t pleased with the “disproportionate media focus on Harper’s security versus climate change” as the disruption was designed to “put climate change on the agenda this year, because the Prime Minster and his government have forced it so far off the agenda.”
To be fair, Sean, Shireen, and Shit Harper Did were very pleased with CBC’s Power and Politics coverage, a show that held several debates on climate change that resulted in one of the country’s first Conservative politicians, MP Peter Braid, admitting that the planet’s extreme weather is, in fact, due to a mutated climate. This debate would have never happened on Power and Politics were it not for Sean and Shireen’s demonstration, which should indicate the importance of such protests in advancing the national discussion on issues that the government chooses to ignore; despite the disgusting condemnations from politicians like Senator Bob Runciman, who would rather see people like Sean and Shireen in Canadian prison.
Sean says the impact of direct protest and activism has “come to define many of the choices I’ve made in my life” and is holding workshops to teach groups about the “people’s history” of other revolutionary movements. With the Shit Harper Did pledge, for example, Sean and his fellow activists aim to create a “spark” that will “encourage people to form into small groups, with close friends, and plan around the issues they’re most passionate about; and find opportunities that exist locally for them to do something about it.” “The reason we’re going that way,” says Sean, “is because we feel that small groups are sustainable, and can be highly effective and agile, and relatively autonomous.” He wants people to “risk arrest” to “disrupt the Conservative agenda.”
With such clear motivation to disrupt Harper’s status quo, it’s no wonder that Sean has been met with such resistance from the conservative media machine. Sean says “there’s been a lot of fear mongering… the motivation behind [this media campaign] seems clear to me, it’s to discourage people from taking this kind of action by discrediting it; by suggesting that it’s not legitimate or through bizarre leaps in logic trying to equate this action with the action that terrorists take… This unfortunately glosses over the role direct action has played, especially in the last century [of enacting social change].”
While Sean calls the anti-protest coverage “laughable,” and it certainly is a joke to the circles to which Sean belongs, the wide net that the conservative mainstream media and the Conservative government cast in Canada is a large one that prevents the full scope of the story from being properly discussed in public. There is a palpable amount of dissent in Canada for the way in which our federal government and the energy industry is recklessly developing our natural resources for economic gain. Meanwhile, the Federal Government recently announced a $24-million dollar campaign to advertise the benefits of the oil sands; but in reality, as the New York Times pointed out in 2012, “Canada’s tar sands… contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.”
With extreme weather impacting countries the world over, specifically in developing nations, we’re seeing flooding, ice storms, and other insane weather effects in Canada that will likely worsen. The impact of climate change will not disappear; but to have a government that denies it’s real, that simultaneously promotes policies that will no doubt worsen it—just as they diminish and attempt to erase the right to protest—is a recipe for disaster. The ostensibly small protest from Sean and Shireen is proof of the chain reaction minor (but successful) demonstrations can cause. But if we allow our country to discredit activists like them, we are willingly signing up for a version of Canada where free speech comes hand-in-hand with unacceptable political fine print.