Why Occupy Canada Matters

Occupy Toronto - St. James Park

What happens if the occupiers go home?

Then we accept this whole global problem was just an anomalous “bank thing” that mostly happened elsewhere. A generational crisis that we’ve past, thank goodness, and one to which Canada was just an innocent bystander. We can even be smug, if we want.

And we’ll find ourselves going through another election cycle four years from now, and we’ll do something silly like double-down on our new fighter jets and our fancy prisons. Or not. Maybe we get that fancy oil pipeline and a nice austerity programme to start a generation’s work of clearing the hundreds of billions of new debt we’ve added. The Boomer retirement will really get some momentum going and we’ll hope we can pay for that tsunami of healthcare costs on, what, Financial Services growth? Tourism? iPhone app development?

What’s the plan? How do we turn the engine of the St. Lawrence Basin back on? What does it make? How does it build real value in the world? How do we use that to educate and house and invest? How do we do it in a way that is sustainable and healthy and improves our quality of life? How do we as a nation do more than finally, barely, and belatedly achieve our commitments to carbon dioxide levels and a 0.7% of GDP to developing nations?

Will we wait and hope that a suddenly government-ready and messianic NDP will save us? A newly rejuvenated (and equally messianic) Liberal Party? Explosive growth and sudden ministerial preparedness in the Greens? How strong would any one of these parties have to be to win, hold, and get things done? None of us really believes that will happen.

The real question is how can our Canadian parliaments work without a popular movement that restores legitimacy to government.

And here we suddenly have this popular movement that is reinforcing itself globally, and is making direct connection between democracy, economy, plurality, sustainability, inclusivity and human rights. They are staying there and sharing what they learn with each other and they are changing things.

The more popular support they generate, the more they accomplish.

Everyone should go to the parks and see the occupations and the General Assemblies: the ones I've seen beggar the imagination to understand how they could ever bring about the kind of change we need.

But we know the current systems of government won’t start working again on their own. They will never bring the change we need. And we’re all mystified as to how they're going to become relevant and responsive and effective. It won’t happen inside of any one party. It won’t happen if we accept that a globalized world ends at national borders. It requires a movement that grabs the governing system itself and smartens it up. Holds it accountable. Insists it smarten itself up. Makes it work for all of us and inspires us to be active, informed participants in it.

It’s not up to the people sleeping in the parks to force the changes we all want to happen. The occupations are a manifest symbol, one unlike any I’ve seen in my life. Occupy Canada is taking space and holding it, experimenting in it. Most importantly, they are buying time for the rest of us to come out and do something. And if it’s too hard to come out and stay out - and it is, winters are cold here - then we need to build something to bring it everywhere.