On Friday, September 25th, Extinction Rebellion Calgary united with our friends, Fridays For Future, and Idle No More for the first time since the pandemic began.
We may have been a bit rusty at some of the logistics of being out on the streets with our message. But it was important to be out, and to join up again with our allies at Fridays For Future, and Idle No More, and to remind the Alberta government, the people of Calgary, and ourselves, that the crisis of impending ecological collapse due to climate change has not magically disappeared.
We did many of the “usual” rally things: listened to speeches, made signs, sang along with inspiring songs, staged a die-in, and contributed to a group art board. We also did some new things, but things that are surely becoming ways of life now in the age of COVID: we wore masks, we didn’t hug, even though many of us hadn’t seen each other in a long time, we put out our hands for circulating “sanitizers” to spray us with alcohol, and we tried mightily to stay 2 metres away from each other. These are all things that, in a short period of time, have become quite routine, but also still feel strange and isolating at times. In old ways, and new ways, it was a very routine rally. No counter-protesters, no scathing press coverage, no arrests or hecklers…everything went off quite according to plan.
So why even write about it? What was noteworthy? Everything around us has shifted and changed, so that a rally that was really very run-of-the-mill, by virtue of taking place in a changed Alberta and a changed world, was remarkable. We have new laws in place in Alberta that make protest gatherings more risky. Bill 1 got a lot of press as the “anti-democracy” bill, with new classifications of some common protest spaces as “essential infrastructure,” and then allowing harsher punishments for hampering essential infrastructure. Further, it has a provision for the definition of infrastructure to be expanded as needed. It’s fair to assume that this is specifically so if protesters are more clever than the government (if?!) and come up with protest sites that aren’t covered in the Bill 1 definition of essential infrastructure, they’ve still got all their bases covered and will not be prevented from applying the harsher punishment to more or less any situation.
At the same time, a much less talked-about Bill 27 was also passed, which raised the fines for trespassing five-fold. These two acts combined make it much more dangerous for people to take to the streets or create blockades, both of which are common protest events. The set of people who can tolerate the risk of a $2000 fine is much larger than the set of people who can tolerate risk of a $10,000 fine, so immediately it shrinks the pool of people who will be vocal about things. Further, here in Alberta in particular, many of our most divisive issues focus on land possession and use, as well as resource extraction. These are the issues that are most likely to see protesters motivated to go out. But these are also the same issues that will likely call out a protest population that includes Indigenous people, who have been policed and abused by the colonial justice system for so long that they may also be more hesitant to make their voices heard now (understandably so). All by way of saying, the stakes just got higher to protest the injustice of governments, corporations, and individuals here in Alberta. So while we were a pretty tame gathering on Friday, we were a tame gathering in a much more hostile environment. My guess is every person there paused for a moment to think about the possibility conflict with the law leading to arrest under these harsh new laws. But in the end, all who were there decided it was worth the risk.
And of course, with Covid-19, the stakes are much higher in an even more literal sense. We can try to be careful, and we did on that day. But there will be slip-ups. And there is some risk of transmission even when the most care is taken. There is much we don’t know about this disease and how it spreads, who will become sick, who will become a spreader, who will die. It’s hard to remember or believe that just 9 months ago we gathered in large groups, rubbing shoulders, hugging friends, shaking hands and didn’t give it a thought. The change is necessary and good, but it is undeniable that there is an added layer of risk to any gathering. Is it really worth the added risk, the exposure? I haven’t been to a movie, a play, a concert, or a restaurant in 9 months, because most of those things don’t seem worth it. But somehow, for our gathering on the 25th of September, a lot of people decided that *this* was indeed worth the risk.
Finally, there is an undeniable perception that aggressive right-wing voices in Alberta have become more active and emboldened recently. There have been several news-worthy examples of anti-racist protests being met with hostile counter-protests in a way that has left some people with physical injuries. So far, this seems to be less of an issue here in the city of Calgary, but still, it gives one pause. Just because one does want to go to a rally at City Hall or the McDougall Centre doesn’t mean that one is wanting to be physically assaulted. So there again, another thing that the folks who showed up on that day had to take into consideration. Not a huge threat, but especially with the background of increased risk, just one more thing to think about.
People on that day had thought long and hard before they came out. They had weighed risks that are new to us, and risks that are old, to decide if it was important enough to join our voices together and say to the government of Alberta: no more. To demand that they begin telling the truth, and begin doing their jobs and acting on the looming climate crisis right now, and to demand that this issue be set above politics such that all voices are heard, all needs are considered, and all paths forward considered, even the inconvenient or marginalized ones. We were there with purpose; with a fierce gentleness; with a deep gratitude and respect for all who had come out and all who had had to make the difficult choice that they couldn’t bear the risk of being there. And I guess those things made it noteworthy, even though it looked a lot like just another rally.