Back in early 2002, not one year after the BC Liberals won a landslide election, a group of student protesters set up camp on the legislature lawn in Victoria.
The initial protest, over tuition increases, started on February 6, 2002. However, it morphed into a larger protest against the new government that turned into a month-long, “help yourself to Victoria’s prime waterfront” act-up. The media and protesters dubbed the legislature tent town “Camp Campbell.”
The provincial government obtained an eviction order less than a week after the camp cropped up, but nothing was immediately enforced. An enforcement order granted three weeks later was clear that while protesters had the right to show up and voice their opinions, or smell the roses, camping out on the lawn would have to end.
The presiding judge, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Allen Melvin, wrote, “There is no constitutional right to garden or camp on legislature grounds.”
And for good reason.
In the interim between the initial occupation, the eviction order and its eventual enforcement, the legislature lawn began to look like any lawn/campground would after weeks of nailed-in tent pegs, cook-stove setups and clotheslines hung for laundry. And there was the added effect from a few pets that accompanied some protesters.
The slowness in enforcing the original eviction was curious and irksome at the same time. (I lived in Victoria until later that year.) The “campers” were despoiling a beautiful piece of public land. The longer Camp Campbell continued, even protest-friendly Victoria could tolerate it no longer. More tourists saw it and complained, as did small businesses that received the complaints sideways, as did ordinary Victorians.
Eventually, many in the media (who might have sided with the early protesters on principle or because it made good television) also became irritated. Ensuing coverage reflected their heightened state of agitation.
So, on the last day of February 2002, some squatters got the judicial hint courtesy of requests from the police and began to take down their tents. Not all went quietly. One camper attacked a CBC cameraman for filming the tent tear-down. Also, and, naturally, this being Victoria, some evicted female campers stripped off their shirts and bared their wares in the direction of the legislature’s cabinet room.
I bring up this historical piece of British Columbia trivia because, while I don’t recall if the provincial government was deliberately slow in asking for an enforcement of the eviction order, the delay had its intended effect: the public, businesses and the media eventually increasingly demanded an end to the destruction of the legislature lawn.
Now, contrast that PR brilliance (or sheer luck) with the rushed end to the recent postal strike by the federal government. If there was ever a quicker and more unnecessary legislated end to a strike, I’m unaware of it.
Whatever federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt and her political staff were thinking, it certainly was not about how to effect long-term change in public-sector union attitudes toward the public purse. It wasn’t even strategically smart in the short term.
After all, in the immediate, the quick end to the strike gave Parliament’s new opposition an issue it could rally its troops behind, this in a June session that otherwise would have been ignored by Canadian families more intent on heading off to their soon-summer vacation.
It also gave organized labour, the leaders of which are too often anti-market and anti-innovation, an early rallying point against the new majority government. Anyone who thinks majority governments needn’t worry about such things has never lived in a province where organized labour has significant clout. And this is so, even if you think as I do, that much of what union leaders advocate is harmful to union members.
In any event, the public never even had a chance to get supremely irritated with either the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and its sweet labour contract or Canada Post.
So ask yourself this question: if you’re a politician who wants to reform Canada Post, especially given its $3.2 billion pension liability, which may end up back in the public’s lap one day, do you want more or less irritation with CUPW and the post office? And how exactly do you get more public exasperation?
Answer: not by short-circuiting the union’s rotating strikes or by ending management’s lockout of postal workers.