Occupy protest stinks

Occupy protest stinks

You know those dirty hippies who gathered in a New York City park last week, and were threatened with eviction for hygiene reasons? They came to Canada on the weekend.

"Dirty hippies" is not an insult. It's an epidemiological assessment of their week-long war against hygiene at a cramped, garbage-strewn, semen-stained camp. The crowning moment was when one hippie defecated on a police car as some sort of political statement.

Not all the Occupy Toronto protesters are dirty hippies. Some of them are professional protesters--folks who go out whenever there's a chance to be counter-cultural. These are the black bloc types who came to agitate in Toronto during the G-20.

Others are union bosses, usually from government unions. That's who created this movement in the U.S. and who promotes it in Canada now.

For them, Occupy Wall Street is a scheme to shift the blame for the U.S. recession away from the White House, and onto someone else other than the Democratic Party.

Banks are still failing in the U.S., unemployment is at 9%, annual deficits there are a trillion and a half dollars, and the U.S. lost its triple-A credit rating. All on President Hope and Change's watch.

So they've come up with new slogans, like the one that claims these protesters represent 99% of Americans, and Wall Street represents the richest 1%. It's class warfare. If it were about helping people, they'd focus on the bottom 10% of Americans. It's the politics of jealousy.

But that sour message isn't clicking in Canada. We haven't had a bank fail.

So not one has been bailed out. Our unemployment rate is 7%. Which is 2% lower than in the U.S. Our national deficit is down to $33 billion. Our credit rating is golden.

Which is why so few people bothered to show up for the Occupy protests across Canada.

By Monday morning, only 20 protesters were left downtown in Toronto's financial district. How did they even know that was a protest? There are longer line-ups at Toronto hot dog carts.

But the CBC, the state broadcaster, went into Olympics- style mega-coverage over the weekend, sending out dozens of reporters and producers to cover the protests as if it were an election. They became a PR agency. They helped organize and promote the events.

One excitable CBC host actually claimed that the protests had spread to "more than 1,000 cities" around the world with "hundreds or thousands" of protesters in each. That's just false; there were protests in a few dozen cities, but in most the number was under 100.

The CBC was engaging in a telethon for the union protests. Not just promoting them, but skillfully editing them, too. They carefully kept off camera any embarrassing yahoos. That's the opposite approach the CBC takes with a genuine protest, like the annual the March for Life rally.

Every year well over 10,000 people march on Parliament Hill against abortion. They don't threaten revolution or anarchy. They don't crap on police cars.

But because they are pro-life, the CBC downplays them. They grudgingly report their rally. And they do their best to hunt for the nuttiest person in the crowd, and pretend that they speak for the whole mass.

I've got an idea. Let's occupy a mega-corporation that demands a yearly $1.1 billion bailout from taxpayers, violates transparency laws and doesn't register its secretive lobbying.

Yeah: Let's occupy the CBC.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY