Not surprisingly, Kingston City Council voted last night to
evict the Occupiers from their camp in Confederation Park. Despite some lively
interventions from Councilors Schell, Downes, Neill, Osanic, and Hutchison, the
local right wing triumphed by one vote, using the dual rhetoric of ‘fairness’
and ‘respect for the law’ that has been deployed in this context by city
authorities throughout the world. We support your cause, they declare, but we
can’t stand idly by while you break the law. By golly, what would happen if everyone were to start acting like that?
In fact, it doesn’t take much imagination to work this out.
Canadian corporations break all kinds of laws, all the time, all over the
world. Our mining companies, for example, ignore environmental regulations,
hire paramilitaries to take out local opposition, and refuse to pay their
taxes.
Canadian governments, at all levels, are no better. Each and
every one of them is in violation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which required
that we not ‘take possession’ of the indigenous territories that constitute most
of what we now call Canada. We settlers are all
living on stolen land – Confederation Park belongs to none of us, and therefore needs to be unoccupied in a way that is
surely beyond the comprehension of the Mayor’s Office.
If these examples seem too distant in space and time, then I
might point out that it’s not just the (apparently) unemployed, unwashed, and
manger-displacing Occupiers who routinely bend the bylaws. There’s another park
not far from City Hall, for example, in which a horde of local trouble-makers
gather each afternoon to flaunt the leashing regulations by allowing their dogs
to run wild and cavort in some highly lascivious ways. If I were the type to
call the cops on my neighbours, I would sick Councilor George on them right
away.
Despite their professions of support for the cause, and
their belief in ‘fairness’, the mayor and his allies are sending a disturbingly
mixed message. First, they are telling us that states, corporations, and good
solid citizens can break certain laws when doing so suits their individual and collective
self-interest. And second, they are telling us that if you are not in one of these
categories, tolerance of your activities
will stop precisely at the point where they might start to make a difference.
This is hardly ‘fair’ at all; indeed, it massively reinforces existing lines of
power and privilege.
If they have achieved nothing else, the Occupiers have
succeeded in bringing to greater mainstream attention fundamental questions
about capitalism, inequality, and the democratic deficit in supposedly ‘free’
societies. Although many people are hoping otherwise, I am confident that this
is not the end of the Kingston Occupation, nor of the Occupy Movement as a
whole, nor of the global currents of social change in which this movement is
embedded. We live in interesting times, times that not even the staid Limestone
City can make go away by selectively burying its collective head in the law
books.
