Fences and Windows (14 page)

May 2000

“We have learned the lessons of Seattle and Washington,” RCMP Constable Michèle Paradis tells me on the cellphone from Windsor. She is in charge of media relations for the meeting of the Organization of American States that is coming to Windsor, Ontario, this weekend, where she will be joined by a few thousand protesters who object to the OAS’s plans to expand NAFTA into all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

“And what were those lessons?” I ask.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” she says.

This is unfortunate, because there are any number of lessons that the Canadian police could have learned about how to treat protesters in the wake of the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. In the absence of any elaboration from Constable Paradis, here are the key lessons the Mounties
appear
to have learned from their colleagues to the south.

Local activists in Windsor say they have been getting phone
calls and home visits from Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers. Josie Hazen, a graphic designer who produced a poster advertising the rally and teach-in put on by the Canadian Labour Congress, says an RCMP officer contacted her and asked a series of questions about these perfectly legal events, its organizers and her knowledge of other anti-OAS activities. “Lots of people have been getting these calls and we think it’s a scare tactic to keep us away from the protests,” Hazen says.

In Washington, I met several nineteen-year-old activists who carried the requisite protective gear of swimming goggles and bandanas soaked in vinegar. It’s not that they were planning to attack a Starbucks, just that they’ve come to expect that getting gassed is what happens when you express your political views.

In Canada, when we saw university students being doused with pepper spray outside the 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vancouver, there was a wave of public outrage. Now, two and a half years later, we have seen so much brutality directed against protesters that we appear to have become used to it. And this is the truly insidious effect of police violence: if protesters are publicly treated like criminals regularly enough, they start to look like criminals, and we begin, albeit unconsciously, to equate activism with sinister wrongdoing, even terrorism.

There is a faction going to Windsor that plans to practise civil disobedience, to put their bodies on the line to block access to parts of the OAS meeting. This is a tactic used by activists historically and around the world to protest against unjust laws. In North America, it came in handy during the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests and, more recently, in native blockades, labour disputes and the 1993 standoff between environmentalists and loggers in Clayoquot Sound, off Canada’s West Coast. It is not a violent tactic—but it is designed to be an inconvenient one.

Essentially, what the protesters are planning for the OAS meeting in Windsor is a sit-in on the streets. Though this may annoy people trying to get to work, sometimes—when meaningful avenues for public expression have been exhausted—important political victories are won out of the small inconveniences.

Yet when I spoke to Constable Paradis she repeatedly described the plans to shut down the Windsor meeting as “violence,” refusing to recognize that blocking a road could be done peacefully. “That’s semantics,” she said of the distinction.

None of the organizers of the Windsor protests are endorsing violence, which brings us to:

“We’re not concerned with the peaceful protesters,”
Constable Paradis told me. “Just the minority bent on shutting things down.” This distinction between good protesters— those only interested in shouting slogans and waving banners in sanctioned areas—and bad, direct-action protesters was also a constant police refrain in Seattle and Washington.

But the activists have learned some lessons of their own. Seattle showed that civil disobedience adds much needed urgency and attention to official marches and teach-ins, events usually ignored by a been-there-done-that press. So, in the run-up to Windsor, there is a virtual consensus among organizers that you don’t have to choose between tactics— there can be hundreds of them, and activism can work on several complementary fronts at once.

The real irony in police attacks on anti-free-trade activists is that it comes in the midst of months of preaching about how increased trade with China will fill that country’s citizenry with an irrepressible thirst for democracy and freedom of expression. The opposite is clearly true: this model of free trade is so damaging to so many people around the world that democratic countries are wilfully compromising the rights of their own citizens to protect the smooth advancement of its agenda.

Which brings us to Lesson #5, the one both police and politicians seem determined not to hear. In the era of corporate globalization, politics itself is becoming a gated community, with ever more security and brutality required for it to conduct business as usual.

June 2000

“This is David Solnit. He’s the Man.”

That’s how the legendary activist from San Francisco was introduced to me last Friday. We were at the University of Windsor at the time, both giving speeches at a teach-in on the Organization of American States. Of course, I already knew that David Solnit was the Man. He was one of the organizers of the shutdown in Seattle. And I have been hearing his name for years, usually spoken with reverence by young activists who have just attended one of his Art and Revolution workshops.

They come back brimming with new ideas about protests. How the demonstrations shouldn’t be quasi-militaristic marches culminating in placard waving outside locked government buildings. How, instead, they should be “festivals of resistance,” filled with giant puppets and theatrical spontaneity. How their goals should be more than symbolic: protests can “reclaim” public space for a party or a garden, or stop a planned meeting the protesters believe is destructive. This is the “show don’t tell” theory that holds that you don’t change minds just by screaming about what you are against. You change minds by building organizations and events that are a living example of what you stand for.

As I’m not schooled in this theory myself, my speech to
the students was a straight-up lecture about how the protests against an expanded free trade agreement for the Americas are part of a broader anti-corporate movement—against growing corporate control over education, water, scientific research and more.

When it was David Solnit’s turn, he asked everybody to stand, turn to the next person, and ask them why they were here. As a child of hippie parents and a survivor of alternative summer camps, these instant-intimacy rituals have always made me want to run to my room and slam the door. Of course, David Solnit had to choose me as his partner— and he wasn’t satisfied with “I came to give a speech.” So I told him more: how writing about the commitment of young human rights and environmental activists gives me hope for the future and is a much needed antidote to the atmosphere of cynicism in which journalists are so immersed.

It wasn’t until we had to share our discoveries with the room that I realized this wasn’t just a get-to-know-you game: it was also an effective way to torment barely undercover police officers. “Yeah, uh, my partner’s name’s Dave and he’s here to fight oppression,” said a guy in a nylon jacket and buzz cut.

Less than twenty-four hours later, David Solnit was in a Windsor jail cell, where he stayed for four days.

The day after the teach-in—which was the day before the large demonstration against the OAS—Solnit led a small puppet-making workshop at the university. After the seminar, only a block away from the campus, the police pulled him over. They said he had been convicted of crimes in the
United States and was thus considered a criminal in Canada. Why? Because fifteen years ago he was arrested at a protest against U.S. military involvement in Central America; he had written (in washable paint) the names of executed Sandinistas on the wall of a government building. Yesterday, after the protesters had already gone home, an Immigration Review Board inquiry found that Solnit’s arrest was wholly unfounded, and he was released.

David Solnit preaches revolution through papier-mâché, which makes it tempting to dismiss the police’s actions as raving paranoia. Except that the authorities are right to see him as a threat—though not to anyone’s safety or property. His message is consistently non-violent, but it is also extremely powerful.

Solnit doesn’t talk much about how free trade agreements turn culture, water, seeds and even genes into tradeable commodities. What he does in his workshops is teach young activists how to decommodify their relationships with one another—an original message for a generation that grew up being targeted by ads in their school washrooms and sold canned rebellion by soft drink companies.

Though Solnit was locked away until the OAS meetings had concluded, his ideas were all over Windsor: art was not something made by experts and purchased by consumers, it was everywhere on the streets. Activists even developed a free transportation system: a battalion of “blue bikes” —old bikes repaired and painted for protesters to use at their discretion.

Communications theorist Neil Postman once wrote that teaching is a “subversive activity.” When teaching puts
young people in touch with powers of self-sufficiency and creativity they didn’t know they had, it is indeed subversive. But it is not criminal.

David Solnit was the object of a well-planned, cross-border police operation. He was identified as a political threat before he arrived in this country. His past was researched, he was followed, then arrested on trumped-up charges. All Canadians should be ashamed of the actions of our police. But most ashamed should be the trade bureaucrats in Windsor. It seems there is still one aspect of human life not covered by free trade: the free trade of empowering ideas.

August 2000

I wasn’t thrilled that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service quoted my book in its new report on the anti-globalization threat. In some of the circles I travel in, writing for
The Globe and Mail
is enough of a political liability, never mind being a de facto CSIS informant. But there it is on page 3 of the report:
No Logo
helping CSIS to understand why those crazy kids keep storming trade meetings.

Usually, I welcome any and all readers, but I have this sneaking suspicion that next April, this report will be used to justify smashing in the heads of some good friends of mine. That’s when Quebec City will play host to the Summit of the Americas, the most significant free trade meeting since the World Trade Organization negotiations collapsed in Seattle last December.

The CSIS report was designed to assess the threat that anti-corporate protests posed to the summit. But, interestingly, it does more than paint activists as latent terrorists (though it does that, too). It also makes a somewhat valiant effort to understand the issues behind the anger.

The report notes, for instance, that protesters are enraged by “the failure to approve debt relief for poor
countries.” They believe that many corporations are guilty of “social injustice, unfair labour practices & as well as lack of concern for the environment,” and that the institutions governing trade are “interested only in the profit motive.” It’s not a bad summary, really—infiltrating all those teach-ins paid off. The report even pays the protesters a rare compliment: according to CSIS, they are “becoming more and more knowledgeable about their subject.”

Undoubtedly, these observations are made in the spirit of know thine enemy, but at least CSIS is listening. Which is more than you can say for Canada’s minister of International Trade. In an address to the Inter-American Development Bank this month, Pierre Pettigrew set out a bizarre George Lucas-style dynamic in which free traders are the forces of global order and its critics the forces of “global disorder.” These sinister foes aren’t motivated by “idealism”—as the CSIS report states—but are driven by a selfish desire “to exclude others from the kind of prosperity we enjoy.” And they don’t have legitimate concerns; according to Pettigrew, they don’t have a clue. “Globalization, quite simply, is part of the natural evolutionary process,” the minister said. “It goes hand in hand with the progress of humanity, something which history tells us no one can stand in the way of.”

If the Canadian government is worried that protesters are going to ruin its party in Quebec City, it should start by admitting that Mother Nature doesn’t write international trade agreements, politicians and bureaucrats do. Better yet, instead of “monitoring the communications of protesters,”
as the CSIS reports calls for, the Liberal government should drag the discussion out of the cloak-and-dagger domain of intelligence reports and devote the next eight months to an open, inclusive, national debate on whether there is majority support for a hemisphere-wide NAFTA.

There is a precedent. In 1988, the Liberals, as the centre-left party, played a leading role in just such a debate, over the free trade agreement with the U.S. But back then, the pros and cons of trade deregulation were theoretical: it was a war, essentially, of competing predictions.

Now, Canadians are in a position to examine the track record. We can ask ourselves, Have the NAFTA rulings allowed us to protect our culture over the past eight years? Has the labour-side agreement protected the rights of factory workers in Canada and Mexico? Has the environmental-side agreement given us the freedom to regulate polluters? Have human rights, from Chiapas to Los Angeles to Toronto, been strengthened since NAFTA was introduced?