Pie Palace

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.