The placards of babes

Only five days until NaBloPoMo. See, theoretically, I have at least three posts I could do now, or save them for after February 1st so that they actually count. This way madness lies.
So I went on a protest march yesterday. I haven't been on one in a long time. Protest marches are a fact of life in any capital city, and Victoria was no exception. In the heady days before I became a parent, I regularly joined the Earth Day March, which falls on my birthday on April 22nd. The thing is, that's in Victoria. In April. April in Victoria means oooh, about 17 degrees Celsius. The last of the cherry blossoms are raining down. Yesterday, in Hades, it said -32 on my computer when my Friend With Whom I Go For Coffee came to pick me up for the rally against the bus strike which has been going on for nearly fifty days. This meant a windchill of -37 or so, with fine snow falling even in the faint sunshine coming from the white disk up in the sky.

Friend With Whom I Go For Coffee is a veteran of protest marches. She parked her van in the Byward Market ("Never park next to the protest site"), and gave carefully neutral answers to the reporters who were attracted by the presence of her children, the only kids there, and who had made their own placards that morning. Their hands were bright with marker splotches, that's when they dared remove their mittens to open their water bottles. Friend With Whom works for a community organization supporting disadvantaged families. She says the phone volume has multiplied many times since the strike began, with so many clients needing help and thrown into crises due to no buses. However, she was at the rally as a private citizen and in case she was quoted, could say nothing that be taken as an official position for her organization. (Another fact of life in Ottawa.)

The trouble with protesting a transit strike is that the very people who are affected can't get there. About 60 or 70 people showed (not bad, considering the circumstances and the weather), and made the pilgrimage from City Hall up to Parliament Hill, a motley crew of mostly students and elderly women, lead by a phalanx of motorized wheelchairs. It was disabled activist Catherine Gardner who had organized this demonstration, the first of three small rallies that took place yesterday. She had some trouble being heard even with a bullhorn (her balaclava may have muffled things a bit), and it was a pity, because I heard her say towards the end, before the frozen demonstrators started to scatter: "Look at us! Remember our faces! These are the people being hurt by this strike." She meant the elderly, handicapped, and working poor. The news coverage that evening seemed to focus on students and middle-class types complaining about carpools and traffic.

Friend With Whom's daughters were joining the others in jigging up and down in the cold, and started joking about hitting the drivers with a pie in the face when and if they ever come back. Friend With Whom moved quickly to shush them. One of her colleagues was being interviewed at City Hall last week, and in the midst of a calm and reasoned statement, had the temerity to remark that the transit union and the city council should be ashamed of themselves. She was promptly surrounded and threatened by four burly bus drivers who had overheard her.

We decided it was time to leave, and the girls handed their home-made placards to two elderly ladies who hoisted the duct taped yokes over their heads. In the sparse television coverage (Parliament brought down a budget yesterday and hogged the air time), their placards showed up again and again ---- always on other protesters!

We walked back into the Market, and I wrestled my camera into my bag, blowing the fine-as-sand snow off it first. By the time, I got my mittens back on, my fingers were stinging.

Oh, and Friend With Whom just called. Her daughters (complete with placards) made the second page of the Ottawa Citizen. "Sure beats 'my kid made the honour roll'," she said.