brunswickannews
Jan. 11, 2012 • Issue 16 • Volume 145 • 3
Occupying the mind
Occupy Fredericton participants discuss their next moves now that they’ve been evicted from City Hall.
Dane Hartt says the dismantling of the camp was “inevitable.” Damira Davletyarova / The Brunswickan Damira Davletyarova The Brunswickan To occupy people’s minds - not public places, is the next step of the movement, says Dana Hartt, an initiator of Occupy Fredericton. When Fredericton Mayor Brad Woodside ordered city workers to dismantle the Occupy camp at Phoenix Square at 5 a.m. last Tuesday, Dana Hartt was not surprised. He said he knew it would eventually happen. “It happened across North America. It was inevitable,” Hartt said. Yet camping in front of City Hall for two and half months was not in vain, Hartt said. It helped the group to draw public attention and support, which is essential for the movement to continue. “We’ve been establishing relationships with community, organizations and local businesses. We’ve been developing initiatives, sort of ideas that would improve the city,” Hartt said. “And this was all prep work for the official phase two of Occupy Fredericton.” As Hartt explains, phase two began when the camp was torn apart. According to the movement’s plan, it is time to realize the ideas that have been shared over the camping period. On the movement’s agenda: to fight inequality, help local businesses and expand eco-friendly values through different community activities and education. “We are not bound to a spot anymore. We are more occupying minds than occupying a little public square,” Hartt said. There are about 20 organizers that will still keep meeting twice a week to plan different community events, Hartt says. Now, they are negotiating with some local businesses, like Cedar Tree Cafe, to have a place where they can meet. There are, however, more challenges ahead, Hartt said. One of them is to keep the movement group together. For
example, the Occupy Fredericton camp had many university students, but the numbers quickly faded in the first two weeks. Whether it is due to schoolwork or cold weather, the organizer can only guess. Another issue that came up when they set up the camp in front of the City Hall, was public criticism and stereotypes. “This idea that we are a bunch of homeless people,” Hartt said, laughing. “As far as I know, we don’t have a single homeless person who is involved, not even one.” Various news outlets reported about Occupy participant Alex Davenport, who changed his address to the campsite, but Hartt said Davenport is still in his early twenties, and before he joined the camp he was living with his parents. Hartt was surprised to hear and read that some people thought the protestors were jobless hippies and were just wasting their time at the camp and encouraged the Mayor to take the site down. In reality, Hartt said, the Occupy support is diverse. It includes blue and whitecollar workers, students, local businesses, and organizations. Hartt, himself, a UNB grad and Eco-Fredericton coordinator, works all night as a patient attendant at the hospital. The job is not the easiest, as many of his patients are elderly people with neurological problems, and it pays minimum wage. “We juggle our jobs and our families, do other volunteer work, all on top of working a ridiculous number of hours for Occupy,” Hartt said. There was also speculation that Occupy Fredericton will take the case to the court, defending their right to keep the camp downtown. Even though the movement has two volunteer lawyers, who are ready to represent them in the court, the organizer said it will be a waste of their time. “Rather than to fight a mayor, we may
just decide to ignore it and go on, and do our own thing, get back to work, on our initiatives and discussion groups,” Hartt said. “Go back to the main focus, what we are here for, because his [Mayor Woodside] actions have been a distraction to us.” But most of the people who criticize the movement, in Hartt’s opinion, often have no sense of what’s going on in reality and what the activists stand for. The camp was a mere symbol, a call for a change and an invitation for the public to engage in local issues. Dismantling the camp is not the end of Occupy Fredericton, Hartt said. “It would seem like the end of us to the people who only see the camp, but there is actually a lot more going on with Occupy Fredericton,” Hartt said. Paul Howe, professor of political science at UNB, agrees that Occupy Fredericton had a great impact and stirred public debate. Now the professor questions if this movement can become more than just an event. “How can you, maybe, take some of that protest activity and enthusiasm, how can you translate it into more permanent organization or force?” Howe asked. As many supporters and critics have already suggested, Howe’s advice to the protestors is not to dismiss electoral process to bring the change they want. But the movement itself, Howe said, was effective. “If we only focused on party politics, and there was no social movement and protest activity, the parties would just operate in sort of vacuum, and they wouldn’t have a strong sense of what issues are important to people,” Howe said. “But at the end of the day, a lot of important decisions are made by politicians and our elected legislatures.”
Occupiers in full swing on the first day of protests in Fredericton. Andrew Meade / The Brunswickan