On Friday, during the reading of the Speech from the Throne, a woman named Brigette Marcelle DePape, 21, who was employed as a page in the Senate, disrupted this ceremony by holding up a sign that read “Stop Harper” (left). She was immediately escorted from the Senate and fired.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, no fan of the policies of the Harper government, thought Brigette's means and method of protest to be “inappropriate”, telling reporters in the House of Commons foyer:
“That is the most solemn moment in a Parliamentary democracy. In theory, we’re in the presence of Her Majesty and the Sovereign. That isn’t Stephen Harper’s room. That’s somebody else’s room. On the other hand, I thought that the act of personal courage was something that you couldn’t avoid. She didn’t shout. She wasn’t disrespectful. Clearly holding a sign up was not appropriate. She was in the wrong room. But her commitment and the concern that all – that many, many Canadian youth come to me all the time that this is their future and when they don’t see climate action, they see their future at stake. So I think that I, while understanding her reasons and feeling that that was a brave act, it was the wrong place.
So what is the right place?
Well, the right place, as May, Jack Layton, and Stephen Harper all know, is the country's shopping malls, luncheons hosted by chambers of commerce, sewing circles, union meetings, parish picnics, but most definitely not the Senate of Canada.
I have had countless conversations with activists on both the left and right who bemoan the fact that young people, like Brigette, love the quick hit and immediate emotional satisfaction of a protest, a flash mob, or sit-in — but then eschew the hard, dull work of actually bringing about change by sitting through one community meeting after another convincing voters that their view is the right one.
Some may point at the federal NDP caucus as evidence of the “quick-hit” youth breakthrough but the sages in that party will tell you that the electoral breakthrough they achieved on May 2 was not the result of having their supporters storm hallowed halls with the equivalent of a “Stop Harper” sign but was, instead, the result of difficult, painstaking work building a political alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives, an alternative that was, among other things, able to raise enough money to be able to match those two political parties dollar-for-dollar when it comes to election advertising. Cost of a national election campaign nowadays: Better come to the table with $20 million. It took the NDP a decade of hard work to be able to do that.
Consider: Jack Layton, a popular municipal politician from Toronto wins the leadership of the federal NDP in 2003. The party, at that point, had only 13 seats and, in the 2000 general election, had received just 8.5 per cent of the popular vote. After much hard work to rebuilding his party organization, the NDP in 2004 won 19 seats, 2.1 million votes, and 15.7 per cent of the popular vote – and parlayed that in Prime Minister Paul Martin's minority government into some very effective leverage.
Then: In 2006, Layton's NDP improved again: winning 29 seats on 2.6 million votes (17.5 per cent). In 2008, Layton's party would get fewer votes — 2.5 million — but would end up winning more seats — 37 — on 18 per cent of the popular vote. And then, after nearly a decade of hard work, in 2011, Layton's NDP gets 4.5 million votes (31 per cent) and wins 103 seats to become the Official Opposition.
As Nova Scotia's NDP Premier Darrell Dexter told me last week: That's great, but it's in the rear-view mirror now. He was on the opposition benches for a decade before he had the political breakthrough that made him the leader of a government. Brigette might be wise to remember that Dexter's historic breakthrough occurred becuase of painstaking hard work and not because of a silly flash-in-the-pan protest.
In fact, for Layton, May, and even Stephen Harper, the change that they and their supporters were seeking did not come about because they held up a protest sign at a public event. Brigette, upon being turfed from the Senate, issued a press release calling for a Canadian Arab Spring, perhaps not realizing that the whole point of the Arab Spring that millions in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen were dying for was for the simple right to have free, fair elections, something Canada did about 4 weeks prior to Brigette's odd protest. In fact, Layton, May, and Harper have, for a decade or more, been counting on the very guarantees of Canada's democratic rule of law that the Arab Spring protesters are dying for. Left, right or green — Canadian activists can count on the fact that all they need do is find more votes than their opponent to prevail. In North Africa and the Middle East, governments win when they find more bullets and bombs than their opponent. (I remember Uganda's opposition leader Kizza Besigye drily telling me in when I was in Kampala in 2007 how, in his country, there had never been a change of government without bombs and feeling rather lucky that we have never had anything like that in Canada.)
And one could argue that the effort, sacrifice and courage of the last 15 years from Layton, May, and Harper is not only greater than what Brigette displayed but greater than what she and her supporters even understand to be courageous.
Consider, in support of that point, Elizabeth May who, in 2006, left what we might call a relatively comfortable and secure job as the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada to seek the leadership of The Green Party of Canada and then, having won that in what was a tricky political battle, she tried for a seat in November 2006 in Parliament by contesting, unsuccessfully, a byelection in the Ontario riding of London North Centre. Recognizing, quite rightly, that she was her party's best hope for its first elected seat in Parliament, she aimed herself at the riding of Central Nova in the 2008 general election but failed to unseat Conservative Peter MacKay. In what many saw as her last chance as leader, she ran against another cabinet minister — Gary Lunn — at the other end of the country in the 2011 general election and this time, in Saanich-Gulf Islands, she won.
It has taken May more than five years, plenty of difficult politicking within her own party, and millions of dollars donated by Green Party members but they finally have their first elected member of Parliament. May, I'm certain, wishes to “Stop Harper” and bring about the kind of change she and her supporters believe in but they did not do it by standing up in the Senate during a Throne Speech and naively believing that a “Stop Harper” sign would make one bit of difference. No: May and her supporters, who are certainly as motivated as young Brigette, devoted themselves to the difficult work of organizing themselves, raising money, reaching out to their neighbours and generally availing themselves of the very democratic process that is unavailable to the millions protesting in the Arab Spring.
As for the current prime minister, it took him some time, apparently, to understand that doing the hard work of getting elected as an MP was the best way to bring about the kind of change he was seeking. Stephen Harper did get elected in 1993 but then, apparently like Brigette, was unhappy with the pace of political change and so he quit the Commons and joined the National Citizens Coalition, a group which, if you think about it, takes a professional approach to doing what Brigette did: Putting up as many signs as possible that say “Stop” to whatever it is the NCC disagrees with. Stephen Harper led this group once and, during his leadership, argued that laws restricting the time and place where the NCC could put up the equivalent of Brigette's signs were unconstitutional. I wish the NCC, the CCPA, the Council of Canadians, the CFIB and all other such groups all the success in the world but, at the end of the day, they are not necessarily agents of change.
I suspect that, at some point, Stephen Harper came to the conclusion that the foot-stomping he was leading at the National Citizens Coalition was not going to bring about political change. Political change happens in our democracy when one has more seats in the House of Commons than the other other guy or gal.
And so, Stephen Harper returned to Parliament: He fought to win the leadership of the Canadian Alliance; he fought to unite the right under the banner of the new Conservative Party of Canada; he fought to win the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. As leader, he fought federal elections in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2011. He is three-for-four when it comes to federal elections as leader of his party, losing one to Paul Martin; winning two minorities, and then, last month, winning a majority government.
Brigette DePape may despise Stephen Harper's politics but showing up in the Senate — or anywhere else in Canada — with a sign that says “Stop Harper” and issuing a press release after the fact is so not going to change things, one feels pity for her and her supporters for, if this is how they believe change will happen, they will never know it.
Change, in the wonderful democracy we have, comes with winning more seats in the House of Commons, more seats in the provincial legislature, more seats on city council, more seats on the local library board — than those with whom you disagree. The experience and success of the politically disparate careers of Layton, May, and Harper are testaments to the commitment of the long, dreary, difficult work that is politics.