-- Download Occupy Canada For May Day, With Bananas as PDF --

A few days ago, I wrote about picking May Day as a good time for Occupy Vancouver to reboot itself and catch up with the Occupy Movement’s worldwide #WaveOfAction.

But I think that idea can be bigger, it can be a day for all of Occupy Canada to reboot.

Here’s how:

1. May Day is a good focal point.
2. A tent city at the Vancouver Art Gallery seems to be a distracting fixation. Occupy Wall Street was about people occupying the space of the 1%: Wall Street. In Vancouver, that is not the Art Gallery. It is a fantastic rallying point, but the 1% lives at the Vancouver Club and the Terminal City club and in the lobby of the banks and the buildings owned by the banks, and the Conservative Party of Canada offices and MP offices, and the Liberal Party of Canada offices and MP offices, and BC Liberal MLA offices, and, and, and..I think you get the message.
3. The 1% is also the Richmond IKEA that has locked out its staff for almost a year, where the Teamster local 213 has been picketing.
4. We should consider occupying these places, temporarily, for 24 hours, permanently, cyclically, whatever we decide.
5. Since the Conservative Party of Canada are trying to turn Canada into a Banana Republic with their new Unfair Elections Act, we should bring bananas to their MP offices. This new bill would allow political parties to supervise the polls during the next election. For generations, Canadians have been self-righteously criticizing that great bastion of democracy [sic] in the USA because their two main parties actually run the election. They don’t have an equivalent to Elections Canada. Their elections are often corrupt. And us? Harper wants to join them in institutionalized electoral corruption. So we should bring a banana to every Conservative MP in the country on May Day. Each of us should bring one banana. Or maybe a hand of bananas. Or maybe an overly ripe banana, or 7. Or maybe a bowlful of thawing bananas like we put in our freezer to make banana bread every few weeks. It’s about bananas because it’s bananas that Canadians would willingly let the incumbent parties run our next election instead of the actually non-partisan Elections Canada.
6. We should also make signs that say things like, “No Banana Republic for Emperor Stephen Harper.”
7. And while the UnFair Elections Act allows incumbent parties to supervise the election polls, it also stops vouching for people because, like the Republican liars in the USA, there have been charges of massive voter fraud that require the removal of vouching for people. There is no evidence of this beyond the government’s assertions of this. Or, lies. The Act also keeps Elections Canada from promoting the idea of voting. Perverse. It stops Elections Canada from reporting to parliament, but letting it report to the government. Useless when there is electoral corruption. And it stops Election Canada from expanding its investigatory powers. These and all the other awful parts of this Act lead to a culture of institutionalized corruption.

So, while we’ve missed the start of the Wave of Action, we can catch up. And the Unfair Elections Act may be just the focal point we need!

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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