Pie Palace

I just got an email from the City, telling me about a public consultation over what the new and improved Lansdowne Park should feature. Let’s hope this consultation works out a little better than the last one.

How do you define success when it comes to a protest? Two weeks ago, when I hooked up with Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament (CAPP), I would have defined a successful protest as having a bunch of people show up.

In that case, today’s protest against Stephen Harper shutting down Parliament was epic. Sorry, EPIK!!!!1. 3,500+ folks turned out. Speakers spoke. Fists were shaken. Signs were waved.

So what?

Let’s geek out a little bit here. Why hold a protest?

1. To scare the bejesus out of your opposition. Imagine your company pays kids in Sri Lanka to chew asbestos to make iPhones. Everyone likes iPhones, nobody cares about cancer kids overseas. Life is good. Until one day when you show up at work and there are a thousand people burning you in effigy. You may start to consider other ways of making iPhones.
2. To impress the pundits. Media, commentators, bloggers, and other self-declared arbiters of importance will pooh-pooh your cause when they think it’s just you and your mom who care about it. When you and your mom organize a rally that brings a couple of thousand people out, those commentators will change their position. And if they think you’re important, that helps scare your opposition all the more, and draw more folks into your movement.
3. To attract more supporters. It’s really disheartening to feel like you’re the only person who feels something. A rally can help solve that. It’s shows potential supporters that they aren’t alone and they have a group to plug into. Hopefully, it will swell your ranks, and enable future (metaphoric) asskicking on your issue.

All of this said, we’re in a weird place. We have certainly have an opposition: Harper and every power-grubbing prime minister from the past 30 years. But we don’t have an “us”. Yeah, there are 213,178 people in a Facebook group, and three opposition parties doing everything they can to ride our momentum; but there’s nobody at the head of CAPP waving a sword and yelling “CHARGE!”

So what did our protest accomplish?

1. Scared the opposition? Hard to tell. Intrepid PiePalace reporters are busily peeking in the windows of 24 Sussex to see if a night-light was left on. When we find out, you’ll be the first to know.
2. Impressed the pundits? Maybe. Mostly? Definitely.
3. Attracted more supporters? Again, hard to tell. The Facebook membership seems to have plateaued, but it seems unlikely to grow, since it was explicitly aimed at this weekend’s protest.

A sympathetic observer might call that two out of three. An unsympathetic type might call that one out of three. Either way, it’s better than a fail. We’ll know the real result when we see the responses from MPs, the government, and the public.

I just got home from Ottawa anti-prorogation rally. 3,500 braved sub-zero temperatures for two hours to show their support for our Parliamentary democracy. Nothing short of awesome. Well done, Ottawa! (I’ll post pics once I warm up)

To be “winning”, for once. I started refreshing the anti-prorogation Facebook group’s web page. Every few seconds, when I refresh, another few people have joined the group. It’s gone from less than twenty thousand when I saw it on Monday, to 98,840 now. Yeah, it’s just a Facebook group. But it feels nice to be part of something verging on a majority.

Another year, another prorogation.

In December 2008, Stephen Harper faced a united opposition willing to vote his government down. He prorogued Parliament.

In December 2009, Stephen Harper faced questions about his government’s policies in Afghanistan and an unfriendly Senate. He prorogued Parliament again.

When Parliament is prorogued, all of the government legislation working its way through the House is discarded. Committees are disbanded before they’ve reached a productive resolution. Harper’s action costs taxpayers money and slows down the work of government. Worse, it’s an abuse of the law: Harper appears to be shutting down our legislature for partisan reasons. Instead of taking his lumps, Harper is taking his ball and going home.

Happily, the story seems to be gaining traction. A Facebook group protesting the move has doubled in size in the last 24 hours: it’s now up to over 40,000 members. Comments on CBC seem to universally damn Harper’s decision. There’s talk of a rally on January 25 23 to protest the prorogation.

In some senses, a rally won’t have any effect. Parliament won’t reconvene until March, regardless of how many rallies are held. But it may remind our Prime Minister that he is a public servant, and as such, he should be working on our behalf. To quote Mr. Harper:

When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent … is when it’s rapidly losing its moral authority to govern.

UPDATE: I had the wrong date for the rally. As RG mentions in the comments, it’s January 23, not January 25.