Anti-Atlantica

The last few days saw an Atlantica conference here in my home city of Halifax. For those of you disinclined to follow links, Atlantica is a theoretical “International Northeast Economic Region”, proposed to more closely link the economies of the northeastern States with those of the eastern provinces of Canada. The theory is that New England and New Englanders have more in common with their Atlantic Canadian brethren than either do with other parts or populations of their own countries. This is suggested because the regions share a long and intertwined history, a common geography and a tradition of being neglected by the central powers in their respective countries because their relatively marginal populations grant them relatively marginal political significance.

Predictably, as with any gathering where high ranking politicians are mingling with high ranking CEOs from high profile companies, there has been some public backlash against the conference and against the concept of Atlantica itself. Halifax has hosted some good protests in the past, and though I don’t ultimately see the point of a bunch of people gathering together to belt out some poorly constructed rendition of some overly cliched picketing rant, I have still taken part in a few of them myself. When I was younger, environmental and war protests were an excellent means of meeting free-spirited hippie chicks with hand drums, so I took activism more seriously in those days. In my old age, though, I was on hand to object to George Bush’s presence in my city* and I once went to an anti-Iraq war protest, but that was more to take pictures than anything. They were large gatherings, and peaceful without exception. During the Bush protest – the largest protest I can recall on the streets of Halifax – there was friendly, even jovial, cooperation between the police and the crowd. There were a few dissenters, there always are, and some speakers who seemed to be deliberately trying to agitate the crowd into action instead of peaceful assembly, but the crowd didn’t follow those voices. We have protests to be proud of, here in Halifax. Like similar protests, they don’t actually accomplish anything, but at least nobody gets hurt along the way and a bunch of people get a smug sense of civic satisfaction. So it’s win-win.

The Atlantica protest wasn’t like that. Some wretched group of assholes calling themselves members of the Black Bloc split off from the main group and decided to cause some trouble. They threw light bulbs and balloons full of paint. One report had them throwing light bulbs full of paint. All reports have them throwing these things at police, wounding two officers in the process. It’s people like these that give anarchists a bad name. Police, of course, very famously don’t like having foreign objects hurled at them by balaclava wearing dissidents and so, because they had no paint filled balloons or light bulbs of their own to fling, Halifax’s finest went the taser and pepper spray route. It’s a shame that protests sometimes go this way – I do not like the fact that police respond with violence, but I cannot decry it because if you throw glass at a police officer (or, more stupidly, at a crowd of them), then you should expect to have a taser shoved pretty far up your ass. It’s an unwise action with predictable consequences, is what I’m saying.

Twenty people were arrested in all, some of them are still being held because they will not give their identities. Probably not one in those twenty could name any specific reason why he was against Atlantica.** But it gave the media what they came for, the images of unnecessary but isolated violence, actually apart from the main protest movement, and this is what they flew with. This presentation of the isolated violence to the exclusion of the message conveyed to the rest of Canada an almost entirely false impression of the overall general peacefulness of the protest. The uselessness of it, however, we were left with no doubt about.

*I object to George Bush on principle, of course, but I felt his being in Halifax introduced a threat to the city that was both unwarranted and unwelcome, and I wanted him to know. His car, of course, didn’t come anywhere close to the large crowd of protesters, and he thanked the Haligonians (seriously, that’s what people from Halifax are called) who came out to wave at him “with all five fingers,” which I begrudgingly admit was a pretty funny joke.

**I am also against Atlantica, as it is proposed by the current corporatist institutions whose brainchild it is. I am, however, in favour of a more ‘organic’ Atlantica developing, whereby the people of the region strive to work together in the economic and political spheres independent and in spite of the nefarious collusion between governments and corporations toward maximizing corporate profits.