/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS: Activists are Canada’s Driving Political Force

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Sep 24 2002 (IPS) - The brightest and most politically engaged people in a northern developed nation like Canada are citizen activists, argues Canadian journalist Tim Falconer in his new book.

‘Watchdogs and Gadflies: Activism from Marginal to Mainstream’, demonstrates how in an era of powerful corporations and inactive government, some of the most imaginative ideas for social and economic improvement originate in grassroots single issue and member based organisations – not out of traditional political parties, which have become mere election machines.

Falconer describes how a member of Greenpeace disrupted a speech by former Ontario premier David Peterson at the start of the 1990 election campaign, playing a tape denouncing his government’s environmental record in front of reporters.

The event, he says, played a symbolic role in the defeat of the ruling Liberal party and its replacement by a group of politicians more sympathetic to the activists’ concerns – the New Democrats.

But a former Greenpeace organiser ruefully admits to Falconer that his organisation failed to steer the new government into concrete action, illustrating a common failing of activists in past years: following-up protests with political action.

As the former organiser told the author, governments could be exposed or embarrassed for inaction dealing with a specific pollutant. But getting a proposed regulation or law approved in the bureaucracy and then voted on in Parliament can take time.

At those moments, environmentalists have to morph into traditional lobbyists to stop a measure from being watered down because of pressure from specific interests.

While activists have become much more politically sophisticated, they have also learned the art of the media sound bite.

They may come from either side of the political spectrum, says Falconer, who finds some similarity among a small minority of ordinary citizens who suddenly become engaged in a specific issue, which then dominates their lives.

He describes two parents concerned about public education – one a back to basic skills advocate who wants more testing of students abilities, the other fighting government cuts to programmes like music and heritage languages, which enrich the educational experience.

They have much in common despite their ideological origins, Falconer says. Both women were ignored by school officials and felt impelled to establish their own organisations to fight for change. In the process, they learned how to frame the debate in the media and get the attention of the sound-bite-driven TV journalists.

While Falconer here equates right and left wing activists, the two camps are really quite different in Canada. Right wing activists have fewer organisations, tend to focus on extremely narrow issues like law and order, schooling, abortion and cutting taxes, often have more money and find it easier to find to get a sympathetic ear from existing governments.

But Falconer is bang on in his perception that many environmental organisations like Greenpeace have been more successful fighting corporations through consumer boycotts of their products.

Home Depot, a large U.S. based home building supplier, for instance, caved into such pressure in 1999 and agreed not to purchase wood cut in old growth forests in British Columbia.

Falconer talks at length about the worldwide movement against corporate driven globalisation, and how young activists, turned off by “old politics”, have become its crucial foot soldiers.

But because the book was written just after the battle between protestors and police during the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 2000, he misses the debate on the pros and cons of militant tactics during political protests.

Some say that after last year’s protests against the meeting of the seven most economically powerful nations (the G7) in Genoa, Italy and the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the anti-globalisation movement has lost some of its momentum.

Falconer also dismisses in a few paragraphs the most important organiser of poor people in Canada, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, which is now spearheading the occupation of boarded up houses in Toronto by the homeless.

Falconer is good at uncovering what makes an activist. But he is overtaken by recent current events, which have put the challenges faced by activism into a sharper focus.