An Occupy protester in Toronto. Photo by Ian Willms

Lia Grainger spent more than two months among the dissidents of Occupy. Nine camps, and dozens of interviews later, the Toronto reporter reflects on the movement’s message, its future, and why she’s convinced Canada needs more Occupy—and we need it now

There is no camping on the White House lawn. On the Wednesday before American Thanksgiving, when President Barack Obama drives down a darkened windy H Street and turns into the gated driveway that leads to his abode, no tents sully the immaculately manicured grass. One block away, several hundred people bed down in tents, tarps and cardboard on the modest rectangle of wet grass and snaking pavement known as McPherson Square—as close as they can get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. I climb into my two-person MEC tent and join the dissidents.

The surrounding buildings light my nylon interior bright as noon. Eight days ago, I left the comfort of my Toronto home to spend the winter visiting Occupy Wall Street camps and actions across the United States. This is stop number two—last week was New York, and I’ve already spent two nights here in the capitol. Last night was a wet one: heavy rainfall had saturated the earth, turning the grass into icy mud that coated everything—my boots, my clothes, the walls of my tent. The smell of tobacco from hand-rolled cigarettes still hangs in the cold air.

It hasn’t taken long to get to know my neighbours. Nearby, in his own little tent is 57-year-old Frosty, a grandfatherly homeless man who started helping in the camp kitchen after he was kicked out of D.C.’s Old Post Office Pavilion by Homeland Security. A few yards away beneath a patchwork of tarp and plastic is 18-year-old Elliot from Northampton, Massachusetts, a pensive adolescent who has been waiting his whole short life for a movement like this to sweep across the nation. In a large communal tent just off 15th St., a half-dozen new arrivals from New York City doze, including a young Queens native named Kelley. The pint-sized instigator has led the crew on a 230-mile, two-week march from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, spreading the Occupy gospel along the way.

Like them, I’d ditched everything—job and home—to experience a pivotal moment in the history of our monumental neighbours to the south, and perhaps in our own nation’s history as well. As a 30-year-old, raised by baby boomer parents who took me on peace marches before I could walk, I had inherited a casual commitment to social justice issues and environmentalism that was more theoretical than practical. I had never felt any real ability to influence the political world. Coming of age in a global world sometimes makes corruption and inequality seem insurmountable. You’re not just fighting local or national power; you’re pushing up against the world. Suddenly, here was 2011: Tunisia, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol. Individuals were upsetting the order of things by simply standing together. Something big and important and kind of wonderful was happening—something outside of the realm of normal, everyday, North American experience, and I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to join them.

On October 15, I began to visit the camps. My first was Toronto in October 2011. I then jumped the border to New York (six days), followed by D.C. (four days), Boston (four days), Savannah (two days), Miami (four days), Los Angeles (three days) and Seattle (two days). My last stop was Des Moines, Iowa, where I saw 18 of the hundred-odd Occupy the Caucus protesters get arrested at the campaign headquarters of GOP candidates. I arrived home on New Year’s Day, 2012 with a changed vision of the movement and a transformed understanding of the value of civil dissent. Some of the naivety is gone, and some of the cynicism is back, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we still need Occupy—and in Canada, perhaps, more so than ever.

When news of the Occupy movement protest camp in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park first flooded the Canadian public consciousness in late September 2011, I was skeptical. By now, the precursors to the American explosion of populist rage are well known: the deregulation of banking and lending systems, the housing bubble, the 2008 crash, the subsequent foreclosures and bailouts, the obscene Wall Street bonuses, and the inability of the administration to improve regulation. It all highlighted one overarching theme—an unprecedented and ever-expanding gap between rich and poor. By 2007, the top ten percent of Americans held 73 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the rest held a mere 27 percent. By 2010, 46 million Americans, or 15 percent of the entire population, already lived in poverty.

The unlikely spark was the Estonian-born editor-in-chief of the Vancouver-based, culture-jamming magazine Adbusters. Inspired by the parallel uproar in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt, Kalle Lasn and his team spent much of 2011 thinking about a soft regime change in North America. On July 13, Lasn sent a visual call-to-action to the magazine’s 70,000-person mailing list, an image he repeated in the next issue’s centrefold: a serene ballerina poised atop the iconic Wall Street bull, scored with a simple question, “What is our one demand?” The frustrating irony of that query would emerge only in the weeks to come.

“The political left for the past 20 or 30 years has been ineffective and whiny. It’s been a real dud,” says Lasn from his home office in Aldergrove, B.C.  “We need to jump over the dead body of the old Left and come up with new models.” If the Left wanted to follow the Egyptian model, he thought, it only made sense to occupy the iconic economic heart of America. On September 17, the first Occupiers set up camp in Zuccotti Park and renamed it Liberty Square.

It’s easy to see why the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—achieved in a matter of weeks largely through the power of smartphones, laptops and human bodies as weapons—might make a lifelong activist like Lasn think: “Why not here?” But America is not Egypt. And Canada is not America.

On October 7, 2011, roughly 200 people gather in a semicircle on the grass in Berczy Park on Front Street. The occupation is set to start in a week; this is the designated planning session. Sarah Rotz, a recent graduate of the environmental studies master’s program at York University, addresses the youthful crowd: “Can we have consensus that we’re going to decide things by consensus?”

Numerous participants raise their arms to form an “X,” the agreed-upon signal for a “block” (strong opposition to a statement). A long and painfully nuanced conversation on the definition of consensus ensues. Many of those seated begin rolling their eyes. One person shouts: “What’s our goal here?” The answering shout: “Our goal is to figure out what our goal is.”

The Toronto Occupiers are trying to follow New York’s lead. By early October, Occupy Wall Street had established itself as a leaderless movement with a commitment to horizontal democracy. By design, the Zuccotti Park camp’s consensus-based decision-making process allows everyone to be heard. After three hours of attempting the same style in Toronto, however, little has been accomplished.

Part of the power of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States is that it speaks a truth nearly all Americans can recognize—even if some protesters can’t name the banks they’re targeting. The failings of their financial system and the influence of corporate interests in Washington are obvious. The same can’t be said for Canada. Corporate donations to political campaigns were made illegal here in 2007. Our government didn’t inject billions in cash into failing banks. Superior federal regulation prevented the banking catastrophe experienced by the U.S. in 2008.

In Toronto later that evening, I voice my skepticism for the first time: How relevant is the Occupy movement in Canada? The answer I received then was the same one I would receive any time I questioned or criticized the movement in the months to come: It’s new. We don’t know what this is yet. Like many, though, I was impatient to discover what the Occupy would become.

When I arrive in Lower Manhattan on October 16, 2011, the mood in Zuccotti Park is jubilant. Yesterday, thousands of citizens in cities around the world had pitched tents in parks and squares in solidarity with the amorphous demands of the 99 percent. It’s day 30 of Occupy Wall Street. Fresh off a 12-hour Greyhound bus ride from Toronto, I round the corner of Broadway onto Liberty Street and am confronted with a teeming mass of people. One month earlier, this space had been little more than a refuge for Wall Street workers on smoke breaks.

In Occupy camps, talking to strangers is de rigueur. The first person I meet is a 26-year-old Newfoundlander named Kanaska Carter. She has multiple facial piercings, neck and chest tattoos, but exudes a calm, feminine warmth. “The first day there was no organization. People didn’t have any roles at all … it was absolute torture trying to get some kind of consensus on what to do at the general assembly,” says Carter, who has been living here since day one. But by day three, “people realized they had to stop dilly-dallying with all the details and get to the point.”

Behind us, every inch of stone and grass is blanketed with human activity. Cops chat with tourists, families make protest signs, and young moms push baby strollers down narrow walkways. It’s a burgeoning autonomous city: there are named streets, a sanitation station, a hospital, a library and a kitchen where everyone eats for free. At the buzzing media centre, dozens of laptops and devices charge simultaneously while bandanna-ed volunteers furiously blog and live-stream. Photographers and reporters are everywhere. Even Geraldo Rivera, the famously mustached Fox News pundit, drops by—and is welcomed.

Within a couple of hours of arriving, I meet 62-year-old Vietnam veteran Bill Johnsen. With his poor-boy cap and handsomely wrinkled features, he looks like an aged Gene Kelly. He’s been waiting 30 years for this moment: something to jar America’s youth into action. “We’re beginning to break down the robotic, mechanical ways that people have related to one another over the past few decades,” says Johnsen. The lifelong activist beams at the scene around him. “This is rich, this is rich,” he says, nodding. “But how do you sustain this?”

Johnsen’s question animated the conversations of protesters around the world. The media, however, chose a different question to dwell on: What does the 99 percent want? Type “Occupy Wall Street” into Google, and it immediately adds the word “demands.” A small sampling of American and Canadian Occupy signs doesn’t help either:

“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”
“End war! No drones.”
“I couldn’t afford a politician, so I made this sign.”
“Igualdad para todos.”
“Natives have been occupied since contact.”
“We want a university for the 99%.”
“You want a list of demands?? Here: 1) revolution. We are not here to compromise.”

It’s a real mixed bag—one that has confounded the mainstream media and given punditry an easy out. Kevin O’Leary characterized the movement on CBC’s The Lang & O’Leary Exchange in October as: “Just a few guys [with] guitars. Nobody knows what they want. They can’t even name the firms they’re protesting against.” This vagueness of purpose sets Occupy apart from other major movements—civil rights, gay rights, women’s suffrage—where the goals were clear, and victory, when achieved, was obvious.

When Lasn called for an occupation, he pushed for a single demand; his suggestions included a one percent “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions and currency trade. Once the epicenter of the movement had shifted from Vancouver to New York, however, the grievances of those pitching tents in Zuccotti Park stretched far beyond any one concrete, answerable request. Lasn now applauds the wide net cast by Occupy: “We wanted a debate, to have an argument about it. That’s exactly what’s happened.”

Many leading leftist thinkers have embraced this amorphous state of opposition to the status quo. In a speech last October 6, Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein told occupiers in New York: “I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.”

I arrive in Washington, D.C. on November 21, six days after Mayor Bloomberg ordered police to dismantle New York’s Zuccotti Park encampment. Many of those evicted from Wall Street are headed this way. They’ll find Washington isn’t the same ideologue’s utopia. By now, across the continent, occupations are beginning to hold a dystopic mirror to the problems that plague each urban centre. In Vancouver, there have been two drug overdoses, one fatal. In Oakland, police violence flared, and in L.A. and D.C., the camps have become refuges for massive urban homeless populations. Only two months in, and the purpose of the occupation is shifting—from spotlighting inequality of wealth to the more practical task of maintaining the camps.

In the D.C. camp there is a small, dark library, a dismal kitchen, minimal food, and the GAs, if they are held at all, often end in shouting matches. In four days, I struggle to find someone willing to explain his or her reasons for being there. “I’m not interested in politics,” is a common response. Educated idealism has largely been replaced with radicalized anarchy.  One day, as we sit sipping chicken noodle soup from paper cups, a middle-aged female camper explains the camp. “You have four kinds of people here,” she says holding up the fingers of a weather-reddened hand. “The activists, the homeless people who have become activists, the homeless people with no interest in the movement, and the crack heads.”

By November 26 I’m in Boston. I discover the plain concrete rectangle there known as Dewey Square isn’t much better. When I arrive, much of the community is gathered in front of a towering spot-lit brick wall to hold the evening’s general assembly. The facilitators, a young German-American named Anna and a middle-aged man named Greg, first spend ten minutes explaining the general assembly process.

A young man named John stands up. His army issue cap covers his eyes: “The safety group proposes that we remove a certain individual, Henry [from the camp].” Henry is an alcoholic who is at times violent. Despite interventions and counseling from members of the camp, Henry is extremely disruptive. As the group debates the proposal, the hypocrisy becomes apparent: How can an avowedly inclusive community defend forcible removal of a member, especially in a public space?

In the next hour-and-a-half, the conversation vacillates between booting Henry out and allowing him to stay—illuminating both the success and failure of the camps.

In hundreds of parks in towns and cities across North America and the world, Occupy camps vitalize debate by “occupying” what might otherwise be abstract conversations with real people and real problems, often leading to real solutions. At the same time, the energy needed to care for the homeless, addicts, and mentally ill—members of the community most affected by the nation’s wealth disparity—undermines the progress of the movement. At one point, a middle-aged man speaks out: “My friends, this is public land. It’s a disaster if this group decides to evict somebody. As much as I think in my heart that he doesn’t belong here … We would [become] a parody of ourselves.”

The Boston occupiers do not evict Henry that night. Two weeks later, in the early hours of Saturday, December 10, the residents of Occupy Boston and their belongings are forcibly removed from Dewey Square. In many ways, it is a blessing.

By late November, the narrative of the movement in the media is one of police violence. The skull of 24-year-old Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a “police projectile” at Occupy Oakland on October 25. This was followed by Lieutenant Policeman John Pike’s casual deployment of pepper spray into the faces of a seated row of passive protesters at the University of California, Davis. In fact, the movement received its first serious treatment in the media when the NYPD pepper sprayed two penned-in female protesters on September 24. In her October speech in Zuccotti Park, Klein applauded the movement’s non-violence: “You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality.”

Perhaps the most iconic representation of Occupy violence is the November 15 photograph of the dripping, pepper-sprayed face of Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old lifelong activist in Seattle. A few days before Christmas, Rainey and I meet over coffee. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment at a Seattle seniors’ housing development. Among the butterfly magnets and baby animal cards that decorate her fridge is a bumper sticker: “Regime change begins at home.”

When I ask Rainey about getting pepper-sprayed, she tells me it was a good thing: “Absolutely! I’m going to be on the cover of The Guardian weekend edition!” More than fifty-five years in the United States have not erased her lively Austrian accent. She says unprovoked police violence—often captured and broadcast by the protesters themselves via social media—gives the movement currency. It implies the Occupy message has enough weight for those in power to deem it worthy of oppressing. “[Occupy is] a microcosm of the entire population, trying to build a movement,” she says. “It’s bigger than any movement we’ve had before in our lives.”

Even so, numerous experienced and successful activists and intellectuals question the practical value of such attention in the absence of demands. Duff Conacher is one of them. As one of the founders of Democracy Watch, a non-profit Canadian citizens action group, he has spent the past 19 years advocating for democratic reform in Canada. Conacher was frequently called upon by media in the early days of Occupy Canada to explain his hopes for the burgeoning movement. His repeated advice: make demands.

The Toronto-based Conacher now speaks about the movement with fatigue. “Essentially, if you don’t have goals, you’re not cornering anyone,” he says. Democracy Watch, he adds, has won changes by detailing the problems, proving they exist and are bad, then setting out solutions, and pushing for those solutions. Conacher points to one of the primary concerns of the American Occupy movement: campaign finance reform. In Canada, he says, the battle was won seven and four years ago, with Democracy Watch’s Money in Politics coalition. That campaign brought advocacy groups together and forced Harper to revoke the right of corporations, unions, and other organizations to donate to political campaigns. He wonders if Occupy Canada is pushing for anything that activist groups or coalitions aren’t already tackling.

“[Occupy] was a great tactic for bringing attention to a lot of issues,” says Conacher. “But a tactic is not a strategy. Nor is it an organization.” When told many occupiers instead think of the camps as an example of a properly functioning democratic community, Conacher’s response is curt. At some point, he says, activists have to decide whether to create communes where everyone lives in the model way, or to change society so that it is the model way. Protesters, he adds, need to engage with the system in meaningful ways to create change. “Yes, [Occupy] got people involved who were not involved before,” says Conacher. “But what are they doing now?”

Conacher raises a fair question—and it’s one Dave Vasey can answer. Vasey slept in Toronto’s St. James Park for Occupy Toronto’s entire 40 day existence. At 33, Vasey has been organizing—primarily around tar sands issues—for the past four years. When he saw the initial call for Occupy Toronto, he didn’t think it would take off. “But then people started to plan—a lot of young people without much organizing experience. A lot of the white, middle-class, suburban demographic.” He speaks with a casual softness that belies the intensity of his politics. “There were a lot of people coming to political consciousness for the first time.”

So what was accomplished?  “It changed the conversation,” says Vasey, echoing most protesters’ response to this loaded question. “It reintroduced capitalism as an issue to be discussed.”

In the United States, protesters point to a number of tangible wins: last November 5th’s Bank Transfer Day, by which an estimated 650,000 Americans transferred some $4.5 billion from big banks to credit unions; Bank of America’s revocation of their proposed $5 monthly debit card user fee; and several courtroom wins regarding rights to protest and civil dissent. Even the change in conversation is tangible. A Nexis search for the term “income inequality” turned up 91 results in the week before the protests began; in the week of October 30, it’s there close to 500 times. Obama now references “the 99 percent”, framing his administration as sympathetic with the movement’s complaints, a stance he’ll likely maintain throughout this election year.

Will time equal success for Occupy? Conacher references the civil rights movement: “It took years for those protests to slowly build and grow. If you look at Occupy, it’s the opposite. They started big and are getting smaller and smaller.”

Vasey believes the lull is a blessing: “Action, reflection, action. The camp was a tactic, and yes, it needed to end. We know the idea of challenging capitalism will take a lot of work, but we have demonstrated that there is support.”

Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn is adamant the world will witness a resurgence of Occupy. He says it is becoming a “rainbow movement” that it is moving beyond occupation, and that the splintering we’re witnessing will somehow be useful. “Some of us,” he says, “are going to get involved in normal politics, some will move into more extreme ‘Black Bloc’ tactics, some will work on the internet.” These divisions regarding fundamental questions of ideology and strategy are already occurring. In Philadelphia, Occupier Nathan Kleinman is running for congress, yet in Oakland, increasingly violent Black Bloc tactics have derailed peaceful protests.

My last visit to an Occupy protest in the United States is on New Year’s Eve, 2011.

“Let’s see, there was David, Jess, Erin, Frankie, Kevin, Kalen…Geez! That’s 10.” Jessica Mizour, 24, of Des Moines, Iowa, is jotting down the names of the protesters who were moments earlier arrested at Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign headquarters. Mazour’s list is written in nearly illegible handwriting, but it isn’t her fault—her desk is her lap, and her office is the back of a graffitied school bus packed with Occupy the Caucus protesters. As she writes, the bus rips down the highway from Michele Bachmann’s headquarters to Newt Gingrich’s. The mood here is different than any other camps I’ve visited—it’s tactical and focused. There are press releases, demands, and a unified message: get money out of politics.

If Occupy is actually evolving into a new method of dissent—a way of exerting pressure on the political system without becoming a part of it—then its continued efforts in themselves could be judged a success. Occupy’s ongoing existence still confounds politicians, law enforcement and the public. Yet, while Occupy reminded candidates in Iowa of dissatisfaction with the status quo, it didn’t force anyone’s hand. To do so, Occupy will likely have to become a part of the system it claims to loathe.

Here in Canada, we’ve weathered the economic and social storm that has pummeled the U.S. and Europe. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to do so indefinitely. Already, our rate of income inequality is growing faster than in the U.S., according to a recent study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Plus, Statistics Canada already announced in late 2010 that Canadians are taking on more debt than Americans for the first time in 12 years. And steering the ship is Stephen Harper, a leader intent on stripping this country of the qualities—public health care, environmental protection initiatives, superior social services—that once made us enviable. We need the tools of direct action and horizontal, participatory democracy that Occupy has provided to steel ourselves for the battles we’ll face in the future.

Whatever Occupy becomes, chances are it won’t know where it’s going until it gets there. It has been more than half a year, but these things take time. Hell, we don’t even know what this is yet.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.)

In today’s Verbatim entry, Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, one of Ottawa’s leading non-partisan advocate groups. With their slogan “the system is the scandal,” Democracy Watch aims to identify, publicize, and pressure for the closure of legislative loopholes that allow waste, corruption, and abuse of power by elected officials and civil servants. Here, Duff and Nick talk about the lobby culture of Parliament Hill, Democracy Watch’s highly successful media strategy, and Ralph Nader’s pivotal role in starting the group.

As always, the original podcast is freely available for your listening pleasure here.

Q&A:

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: We’re sitting here in an Ottawa office. We’re only a few blocks from Parliament Hill. And you’re a guy who is a government watchdog—government ethics, government accountability…

Duff Conacher: Yes.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: How can you possibly have any work to do these days?

Duff Conacher: [Laughs] Too much, unfortunately, and always have been for the last sixteen-and-a-half years, just because we’ve lacked the resources we really need to do the job. So we’ve just tried to work smart instead of trying to dabble in everything. Usually, if you dabble, you don’t make much change. And instead, we work smart and choose the real avenues where there’s a real opportunity—a window open—to really make change.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So where are those avenues?

Duff Conacher: Well, the big one now, in terms of policy making, is—it looks like we’re heading towards having another Accountability Act—some way, it being introduced. The Conservative government won’t, because they stated publicly that they believe they’ve cleaned up the federal government with their initial Accountability Act, and are sticking to that, despite all the evidence. The Liberals have pledged it; the NDP and the Bloc have always supported further measures to close loopholes. So likely, it won’t happen until another election. Hopefully, it will happen before, though. All it takes in a minority government is the opposition to cooperate, and they can pass anything they want, because they have a majority of MPs in the House. So that’s the big policy-making initiative. There are 90 loopholes still to close in the government system to make it democratic and accountable.

And then, we’re in the courts, challenging Prime Minister Harper over his election call in September 2008 as a violation of the fixed election-date law.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: There’s a lot of stuff happening this month, as well. Not on the accountability front in policy terms, but in the newspapers, politicians doing all kinds of crazy things—or at least being accused of those things. And the government ethics commissioner has been asked to look into a number of things. She’s chosen not to look into some. What do you think about that stuff? Does that keep you busy, too?

Duff Conacher: Very much so. Essentially, because these loopholes are in the system that allow dishonest, unethical, secretive, unrepresentative and wasteful behaviour, people exploit the loopholes. And so there’s usually a scandal a month or so, and if it’s not at the federal level it’s provincial or municipal, and we get calls on those as well, because we’re really the only group that works on those issues in Canada. And you have media calling, saying ‘what are the actual rules? What are the lines that can’t be crossed? What should the watchdog agencies be doing?’ And so I’ve been very busy working on those, and will continue to be. But what we focus on is that the system is the scandal. And if you close the loopholes, strengthen enforcement and penalties, you’ll discourage more people from doing this stuff. And we won’t have a scandal a month, and hopefully we will have government focusing on what it should be doing, which is solving problems in society instead of being caught up and dealing with all these scandalous activities. You won’t ever stop them, but you’ll discourage a lot more of them if you actually have effective laws and effective enforcement.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You’ve been doing this since 1994 at Democracy Watch.

Duff Conacher: That’s right.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And right now, as you say, you’re the only group doing it. Does that surprise you?

Duff Conacher: It surprised us back then, when we started up, that there wasn’t a group already. At that time, 136 years had passed since Canada became a country. And no one ever thought that maybe we should have a group that advocates for democracy in Canada? Yeah, it was surprising then. There are other groups that have started, mostly think tanks that do the odd report. We’re the only real advocacy group, using all the different strategies of being out there, meeting with politicians, getting media coverage, and also going to court if we need to.

Why there isn’t the interest? I don’t know. People have given me different theories, one being that we had the New Democrats start when the whole issue of democratic reform was starting to become really hot in the late 60s and early 70s. They were sort of viewed as the group that would push for this. So we had a third party, unlike in the U.S., for example, that was pushing for these things. But they haven’t pushed very hard, actually. They’ve ignored a lot of issues we’ve taken up.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: But does it say anything about what the Canadian people think? I mean, you are very well informed when it comes to the Federal Accountability Act and a number of other federal pieces of legislation, but what about the laymen and the laywomen from coast to coast? Are they satisfied, do you think, with how things are looking from their end?

Duff Conacher: No. The polls show very clearly the hot button issue is lack of honesty in politics. People get baited with false promises during elections, and then the parties switch. Whichever party wins power breaks the promise and then lies about keeping the promises. And people are very upset about that. It’s the number one hot button government accountability issue; also the ethical behaviour; the secrecy; the waste, of course, because it’s waste of the public’s hard-earned money that they’re forced to pay in taxes; and then lack of representative decisions. You have different slices of the population upset about whatever issue, because they feel the government’s not doing the right thing. So the polls show wide concern, more than 80 percent of Canadians concerned about all of these areas.

The real gap is that they don’t necessarily vote and choose which party to vote on based on just this issue. And since politicians write the rules for themselves and they want to get into power, it sometimes isn’t top of mind for the politicians. And that’s why it’s been slow going and, I think, ignored for so many years. There’s also a general assumption that we were at the top of the world. And we hadn’t really been measured until measurement started in the mid-1990s showing that, actually, many other jurisdictions were way ahead of us on things like open government.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You are the only group doing this. But I think it goes further than that, because I think, Duff, you are sort of the brand. Democracy Watch is Duff Conacher. And you’re the guy who hold press conferences and berates the government for doing these things. What do you think of that sort of career trajectory, where you’re now Ottawa’s government watchdog when it comes to ethics and accountability?

Duff Conacher: Well, we’re not the only ones on accountability if you talk broadly about it, because lots of groups watch specific decisions; like environmental groups watch decisions on environment, and if they think the process was really bad, they’ll point that out as well as point out that it was a bad decision overall. And we also bring lots of groups together in coalition. We’ve never had resources to have more than myself as a full-time staff person. So people get the impression that I’m the only one doing things, but we’ve had lawyers help us out pro bono; we have lots of volunteers doing research; we have active board members that help with the website and with networking. And as I say, we’ve formed four nationwide coalitions. So it is a bit unfortunate, because people get this impression that I’m the only one doing things and that I am Democracy Watch, but in fact it is an organization. We work with lots of partners, and we have lots of assistance. We have more than 100 citizen groups from across the country involved in our coalitions. They help with financial support and writing letters, and they testify before committees as well. So it is more of a movement, not in terms of financial resources, but in terms of people involved, than it may appear sometimes—because I’m always the one quoted in the media.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And you are quoted in the media quite a bit.

Duff Conacher: Yeah, that part’s gone well. But that’s part of what we focused on—working smart. We know that the ministers watch the media. We know that opinion makers do. And that influences, over time, voters’ opinions. And so we do focus on making news, so that we get in the headlines. And the way we do that is essentially by doing audits consistently. But also, the politicians generate a lot of news themselves, just because so many of them regularly act dishonestly, unethically, secretively, unrepresentatively or wastefully. So they create the news, and we’re called for our opinion. And because we’re experts on where the lines are and the rules they’re supposed to be following—or just want to point out that, yeah, it’s legal for them to do this but obviously shouldn’t be—we’re often called upon to comment.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I want to go back to the beginning of this process of watching the government and pointing out unethical behaviour and unaccountable behaviour. It was 1994, I guess, when you and others founded the group. How did that come together?

Duff Conacher: We actually opened the doors in September 1993. And the way that came together was, first of all, inspiration. I worked for Ralph Nader as an intern back in ’86 and ’87, and then went back to law school. I was working on safe drinking water issues with Nader, even though I had done my undergrad in English and had no expertise in the area. He has interns take a fresh look at things, even if they’re not experts. And I knew I wanted to go to law school, and he gave me a direction. I was more interested in his work on good government and corporate responsibility. Democracy Watch also works on, specifically, bank accountability as our major issue in corporate responsibility.

So I went through law school. I was looking for groups in Canada that do this—and didn’t find any. The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation works a bit on access to information and, of course, the waste issue, but not on the broader issue of democratic reform. And that was really the only group. The Council of Canadians claimed to work on it, but they didn’t specifically focus on democratic reforms. They focused on more substantive issues. And one of the projects I worked on with Nader was a book called Canada Firsts, a compilation of things Canadian have done first or foremost in the world. When I was at his office, that project fell in my lap because I was the only Canadian working there. And it became a number-one bestseller, and he very generously agreed to provide those proceeds as the seed funding for Democracy Watch. And through my work with student groups and others, I’d connected with a few other people and they agreed to be advisers or board members, and we all started it up in the fall of ‘93.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, you were a Nader’s Raider. Did you know any other Canadian Nader Raiders?

Duff Conacher: That’s actually how I ended up getting down there. My uncle was a pro hockey player, actually on the last Leafs team to win the Stanley Cup. He knew Ken Dryden. And I had been travelling Central America in ’85—came back and was looking around for something to do with non-profit NGOs, and he just happened to have a conversation with Ken Dryden at the time. Ken Dryden had actually worked for Nader while he was a goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens. He was going through law school—very impressive guy, now a federal MP—and he went down for a summer, which is the off-season for hockey players, and he worked for Nader. So he gave this idea to my uncle, passed it on to me, and I ended up down and working. And I found out then that there were other Canadians who had done the same thing, including one of our advisers who has also helped us out as a lawyer—a guy named David Baker in Toronto. I’ve helped a number of people since that time go down and be interns, including a couple of the founding board members—Aaron Freeman and Craig Forcese. They both did a stint in Nader’s office, as well.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Do you and the other Nader Raiders have a rapport that’s lasted throughout the years? That was 20 years ago – more than 20 years ago.

Duff Conacher: It is now, yeah, it’s true. It’s now 25 years ago this summer that I went down there. It’s a pretty common experience. Nader’s office, the specific one that I worked in that I’ve helped get others down to—Ken Dryden worked in a separate office—a lot of them worked in the same way. But Nader’s office … in a way, it’s kind of his brain. If he has something on his mind, an issue to take on, there are people working on various projects. But the office will mobilize to help a news conference be held any day, and there are usually 10 to 15 different people working on different issue—a fascinating place; lots of leading research and advocacy, and he’s been doing it himself now since ’63, and he started up the group in ’65. For him, it’s been 45 years.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: For you, it’s been a number of years—September of 1993 until now. On your website, you say you’ve made changes to over 100 different democratizing changes to 16 different pieces of federal legislation in six key areas—a number of victories that you’ve claimed. How much of a difference do you think you’ve made. Those are numbers, but just in terms of changing the culture?

Duff Conacher: Well, certainly with ethics, the standards are much higher than they used to be. The rules are stronger, the enforcement is stronger. And so the expectations are higher amongst the public. And I would say also in the area of political finance, there have been major changes that we’ve won, where there’s now a ban on donations from corporations, unions, other organizations. Individuals are limited to a fairly low amount. Those are the two biggest areas.

If we win our case on the fixed-election-date law, that will be a world’s first case, in terms of these kinds of measures—restricting a prime minister in a parliamentary system from calling snap elections. But it’s mainly in the areas of ethics and money in politics on the good government side. And then bank accountability, yeah, we’ve had some effect there as well, in terms of disclosure and some restrictions on what the banks can do. They have to treat customers more fairly. We’ve reduced some of the gouging. It is a big struggle. Politicians write the rules for themselves and also, the bank lobby is the strongest corporate lobby with the most resources of any in the country. But every year we’ve made a few more changes, and as long as you can do that, it’s worth continuing—and rewarding to continue, as well, because you’re actually making change.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What about that lingering culture in Ottawa where you have pollsters and lobbyists and government relations consultants—whatever they choose to style themselves as—who used to be members of parliament, or used to work for members of parliament, or used to fundraise for political parties, who now work for all of these organizations that are just down the street from the politicians. It’s a very in-crowd, and there’s a lot of influence. Obviously, that’s nothing new. But how can you change that?

Duff Conacher: It’s really difficult to change completely, because it’s a human system of relationships, and you can’t stop people from having relationships with each other, friends or otherwise. What we’re trying to do is eliminate—and we’ve won rule changes, we’ll see if they’ll be enforced—that say you can’t do anything for anyone, or give anything significant to anyone, who you’re lobbying. And we’ve won some cooling-off periods, where people now have to sit out, if they’re at the senior levels, for five years from becoming a registered lobbyist. There are still loopholes that are still technical loopholes in this, and I’m sure there are people exploiting those technical loopholes. And so we still have work to do in that area, but the general ethic now, and the guidelines that are in place, are that there has to be a separation in terms of favour trading—and that’s a step forward, if it’s actually enforced.

There are two test complaints right now, before the lobbying commissioner and the ethics commissioner. And if they rule properly, they will find a couple of lobbyists and cabinet [ministers] and MPs guilty. And that will send a warning shot across the bow to everybody that you have to really separate yourself, and you can’t be doing things for each other, because as the Supreme Court ruled in 1996, if you don’t have the separation between private interests and public interests, you don’t have a democracy. But it’s really difficult, because people know each other, they get to know each other, and just based on that, they get some inside access and get to the top of the line, the front of the line. And the average voter’s concerns get ignored, just because of that human system. And it’s really difficult to separate people who know each other.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Do you ever get overwhelmed when you’re going home at the end of the workday and think about how much work there is left to do?

Duff Conacher: Rarely, just because I remind myself of the resources we have—not just myself, but volunteers and everybody, and I’m realistic about what we can accomplish. I’m not a political junkie, because being a junkie in any way is not healthy. And so I don’t follow everything all the time, because it should, if you’re sane, drive you crazy. Because there is so much going on, and so many rumours and things swirling around, that to pay attention to it is just kind of a crazy mess given the number of people involved and the number of stories and rumours. Just try and work smart, focus on the things we can actually change, keep in mind that saying about having the wisdom to know the difference between the things you can change and the things you can’t, and just leave it behind when I leave the office, as well. It’s not easy, but I know it’s the only way to do it and remain healthy. If you burn out by trying to pay attention to everything all the time, then you just waste a ton of time, because all those years you’re burned out, you don’t get anything done. So better to just, you know, slowly chip away and focus on a few things and concentrate and ignore everything else, so you can still bring the energy to it and not get driven crazy and burned out.