Occupy Toronto has no right to St. James Park

On Tuesday the City of Toronto issued eviction notices to the Occupiers at St. James Park, I am sure in response to my post on Monday. A group of the Occupiers went to a judge for an injunction claiming that the eviction would violate their charter rights. The judge put a stay on the enforcement of the eviction notices until he had heard the arguments on Friday. This puzzles me.

I am not a lawyer. I have zero legal training, but I believe that I have a reasonable grasp on the constitution for a layman. I would have thought that this would be a pretty open and shut case. Isn’t it pretty well established that in Canada if you want to protest on public ground you need a permit? I hadn’t thought that this was a controversial limit on free speech.

As I say I am not an expert on constitutional law, but that doesn’t really matter because regardless of what the judge decides this is a reasonable limit on free speech and the Occupiers should be removed.

Lorne Gunter put it pretty well in his column published earlier today:

You don't have an unreserved right to live in a public space, no matter how fervent your opinions are nor how noble you believe your cause is. Your actions diminish the ability of other citizens to enjoy that public space, too. By demanding that you be permitted to camp out in a city park until income parity is reached or caps to CEO pay are legislated or the dictatorship of the proletariat is achieved, you are, effectively, insisting your rights trump those of other members of the public who may wish to use the common space differently. What gives you that right?

It is a key point that the Occupiers are restricting the ability of others to use the public space. This restriction is a cost that the rest of the public who may wish to use the park must pay. At the same time the Occupiers are completely ignoring the usual method of assigning usage of this public good. Essentially the Occupiers, by claiming exclusive use of the park, are demanding a public subsidy for their free speech.

Here we come to one of the misunderstood aspects of the right to speech and peaceful assembly. For it to be truly peaceful you cannot force others to pay for it. Magazine owners do not have a responsibility to publish everything that is submitted to them. I am not obligated to listen to every speaker with equal attention. And no one has an exclusive claim on a public good for the purposes of voicing an opinion.

The people presently squatting at St. James Park have the right to say and believe what they like, but that right does not allow them to continue to squat on public land.

Note to Rob Ford: either deal with Occupy Toronto, or shutup

For a week or so I have been reading articles like this one where Rob Ford says that the Occupation at St. James Park is illegal and at some point the law will be enforced. When asked at what point the law will be enforced he says that it will be soon. Then he claims that they will likely go away by themselves anyway.

I understand Mr. Ford’s dilemma. It is the same problem facing every municipal leader that is unfortunate enough to have to deal with one of these Occupation protests. They are clearly committing a crime by squatting on public land, but if police are sent in to enforce the law the situation will be uncontrollable by the elected officials. Regardless of how much blame the mayor actually deserves, it is guaranteed that if violence ensues the mayor will be blamed.

The problem is that by saying the police will eventually be sent in but not saying when, Rob Ford is likely breathing life into the protesters.

Many of the protesters already despise Rob Ford (if their signs are any indication), so by being critical of the protest Rob Ford is setting him up to be the perfect vocal point of the Occupiers. Rob Ford is providing an enemy that is not abstract. He could become the embodiment of the great evil power that must be defied.

At the same time by not actually doing anything about it, Rob Ford is making it appear that defiance is not just possible, it is easy.

“I can have all the fun of standing up to the man (i.e. Rob Ford),” thinks one inclined to join the protest, “but without actually having to risk a baton to the head or a night in jail.”

Rob Ford needs to stop pussyfooting around and either be the man of action we all thought he was, or stop saying anything on the issue at all.

Occupy Toronto, a local smelly nuisance

I hadn’t checked out the Occupy Toronto crowd since the first day that it started. So last Saturday I figured I’d stop by for a peek. What I saw there was pretty underwhelming if you consider this movement is being touted as the source of revolutionary change. In fact the only thing that they appear to be achieving is earning sympathy for the people who live around St. James Park.

The first thing I noticed about the tent city is the smell. It absolutely stinks. I feel sorry for anyone who has to walk past it on their way to work.

The second thing I noticed is that the place was incredibly dirty.

The third thing I noticed was that the few people who were there were also incredibly dirty.

A friend of mine told me that his colleagues at work had, charitably, gotten together the week before the Occupation began and cleaned the park. Their good works had been completely thrown out the window because I have never seen St. James Park look so disgusting.

The most attractive feature of what is otherwise a rather plain looking neighbourhood has been turned into what smells like a garbage dump and looks like the worst kept camping site in Canada.

Keep in mind that the park is next door to a church, a very popular church to hold weddings. I shutter to think of the poor couple that thinks they had paid for a beautiful wedding at one of Toronto’s nicest churches, but instead are getting married at an open air homeless shelter.

All of this is pretty benign (unless you are the poor sucker that has to clean the place up) but their only achievement is being a nuisance. After a month of not showering the movement continues to be pretty vague and dominated by those that are shouting ideas that have been discredited for decades. There is no plan on how to achieve any ends beyond, “starting a conversation.”

So even if you are sympathetic to the goals of the movement, you have to wonder if all this is nothing but sound and fury, and stink. Mostly stink.

Should the libertarian movement engage with Occupy Toronto?

My initial gut reaction to the Occupy movement was to dismiss it with a sneer. I had spent many of my post-secondary education years witnessing incoherent, ineffective, and politically-stunted protests, and I assumed that the Occupiers were cut from the same cloth. Most of the news reports I came across (both hostile and friendly) seemed to only confirm my assumption, yet the Occupy Wall Street concept has picked up steam in a way that other such movements have not. Considering that the main message, if one can be found, of the protest is against too much corporate power, libertarians in the States seriously debated if they are missing the boat by failing to engage with this crowd.

The case for engagement is that libertarians basically agree that corporations have too much power. This, however, is not a flaw with a free market system but the result of government cronyism with certain businesses. If libertarians participate and engage, then they can focus at least part of the ire on government interventionism. Perhaps they could even convert some of the current Occupiers to libertarian thought.

I was skeptical but the argument was strong enough that I wanted to test it, or at least satisfy my curiosity by looking into the Occupy Toronto protest.

Unfortunately the crowd that took over the St. James Park last Saturday was exactly the sort of people that I knew so well in university. Between giant posters of Chairman Mao and Karl Marx, I saw signs that ranged from the bizarre to the painfully ignorant. CUPE, Mohawk Warrior, and Communist Party flags were visible throughout the park and so were drum circles chanting such classic hits as, “state democracy, is hypocrisy.”

I saw a sign that blamed Rob Ford for the holder’s student debt and a sign that blamed Stephen Harper for the income distribution over the last 30 years. There was the shocking, such as a man holding up a sign titled “Kill the Rich.” And the obscene, such as a child wearing a sign asking “what is my market value?” As Plato himself once wrote, it is just not possible to enter into a rational discussion with a crank (I paraphrase).

Still there were those there who were trying. One of the first things that I noticed when I got there was a giant Ron Paul banner. After walking around a bit to see the place for myself, I approached this group and asked them why they were there. The apparent leader of the group agreed to let me record him and you can see his answer here, which is mostly the same as the argument I described above.

I asked him how he was being received and he said that he was getting some negative responses but mostly people appeared happy to see him there. While I talked to him a smiling man walked up to us to show us his Ron Paul tattoo.

I saw one other man in the crowd who was holding a sign declaring that he was against crony capitalism and not capitalism. Also I was told that there was at one point a man dressed up as Atlas--a reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. So it does seem that libertarian views were present even if they were dwarfed by the unabashed communists.

Encouraged, my girlfriend, who had come with me, wanted to make a sign of our own. We found some organizers who were providing material for signs and asked only that the sign couldn’t be “against anything.” With this vague instruction in mind we settled on the whimsical and obscure words “who is John Galt?” as our sign.

After walking around with this sign for a while we were set upon by a number of Occupiers. At first they couldn’t believe that our sign was serious and they demanded to know the meaning of it. I explained that we were trying to express, obliquely, that the 1% was needed.

What followed was what I can only describe as a waste of breath. As I tried to make my case, I faced absurd claims, such as citizens of the Soviet Union being immune to the profit motive, and derisive sneers in the place of argument. Eventually one of them accused me of being racist for saying that capitalism was primarily responsible for advancing standard of living.

Of the eight people that we were talking to, only one appeared at all interested in having an honest discussion and I suspect that the ire of the others would have been worse if he hadn’t dampened them repeatedly.

So no, I don’t think libertarians should bother to engage with the Occupy Toronto crowd because they are simply not interested in listening. Even if my experience was atypical, I have to wonder what the point would have been. Much like the protests in my old university’s quad, the Toronto Occupation isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t going to accomplish anything. By showing up libertarians are only confirming that they belong among the cranks and the fringe.