Several hundred protesters gathered on Confederation Park for Occupy Ottawa Oct. 15.
Concerned by economic inequality but muddled on unifying ideas for change, a crowd of several hundred people gathered in Confederation Park Saturday for Occupy Ottawa on a day of protests across the globe.
Like the original Occupy Wall Street protest, the Ottawa event was deeply decentralized, with the crowd voting with their hands on what course the protest would take.
Brigette DePape, the former Parliamentary page who held an anti-Stephen Harper sign in the House of Commons and a facilitator for Occupy Ottawa, polled the crowd on how the protest should proceed.
Starting just after noon under a light rain that soon abated, DePape and other organizers spent more than an hour debating the process by which Occupy Ottawa would operate, seeking crowd approval for every decision.
One of the first orders of business was a vote on whether to use a public-announcement system. The amplification decision was approved by the crowd, which voted “yes” using a hand-voting system laid out by organizers.
A discussion on whether the crowd should march to Major’s Hill Park followed.
But without a line-up of speakers, it was unclear what the protest was about beside a broad concern with economic and social inequality.
“We are here. We are the 99 per cent,” DePape said early in the rally, before the procedure talk began.
Signs against the Harper government, and Labour Minister Lisa Raitt in particular, were splashed throughout the crowd, a mixture of young and old. Several signs were from union locals concerned about negotiations between Air Canada and its flight attendants.
Guillaume Muller, a University of Ottawa law student, said he joined the gathering around the park’s central fountain to protest political influence.
“There’s a problem with money being concentrated at the top and influencing politics way too much,” he said, adding Ottawa pulling public financing for parties worsens the situation.
Economist Richard Pereira, holding a sign reading “Tar Sands Bankers,” railed against bankers’ role in financing the Alberta oilsands.
“It’s worse than the American banks in some ways,” he said.
Around 50 protestors reportedly camped out in the park overnight.