Occupy Vancouver: A Real Bore

Occupy Vancouver Protestors | BCBusiness
Youth demonstrators at the Occupy Vancouver movement are protesting corporate greed. But they’ve got a lot more to be angry about than just inflated salaries.

You’d think a world-wide protest against greed started by a Vancouver-based magazine would generate some real buzz when it finally came to the city. But Occupy Vancouver is just plain boring.

I was looking forward to Occupy Vancouver because I like to see a good chanting street demo as much as the next guy. Protests are a Vancouver tradition, going back to the old stop-the-war marches.

Instead, I got … well … lame.

Sure, 4,000 people apparently showed up for the kickoff, most of them apparently drawn by the sunshine – rare for this time of year – and the festive atmosphere inherent in a “protest” that’s had extensive media coverage in the U.S.

But by nightfall, there were only a couple of hundred around. And by Monday, there were only a relative handful.

Mostly, it seemed like a warmed over amalgamation of every other “protest” march we’ve seen here in recent years – a bunch of hardcore, aging lefties chanting the same old chants, ripping the government for … whatever.

If you want to see how muted this initiative (I’m not sure it can correctly be called a protest) is, all you have to do is look at the 10 “best” signs at the protest, as recorded by the press.

This was a big hit at the initial protests on Wall Street in New York, where clever signs were everywhere, most of them creatively attacking financial bigwigs for their collective greed and shameless sucking on the government tit.

I mean “Canada Before Capital Not For Sale” or “My Mom Taught Me To Share”? Boring.

Of course there was the required youth cohort, which seemed even more inarticulate than usual, issuing bromides like, “(You name it) sucks. We should be building more housing for the homeless.”

We are building housing for the homeless. In fact, they’re the only ones catching a break regarding homes today.

They deserve it, but so do the other couple of million people in the region who, according to latest reports, are now spending, on average, up to 94 per cent of their income on housing. Even in the wildest days of real estate speculation, before the great collapses, the ratio was never that high.

But I didn’t see anybody protesting that.

So here’s my suggestion: Let Occupy Vancouver continue. But instead of it being a venue for the usual big union complaints about the government or some vague complaint from a few disaffected youth, how about we get out there and protest about some real issues.

Let’s protest the lack of affordable rental housing, or the growing gap between union and service job salaries, or the fact that our young people have to move out of the area because their coffee-shop wages won’t afford them so much as to live in a dog house in the city, much less start a family and live in a real home.

We’re supposed to be a creative city, the protest capital of Canada, and there is certainly a lot here to be angry about.

But you’d never know it by this demonstration.