By Mike Hager and Evan Duggan
Vancouver Sun
October 31, 2011
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Residential+school+survivors+target+Catholic+Church/5632056/story.html
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| A dozen protesters stood in front of Holy Rosary Cathedral Sunday. Photo by Mark Van Manen, PNG, Vancouver Sun |
About 300 Occupy Vancouver demonstrators marched through Vancouver's downtown core demanding global financial and trade reform Saturday, but only a tiny fraction of the protesters could agree to mount an additional march Sunday targeting the Catholic Church.
Only a dozen protesters occupied the front steps of Holy Rosary Cathedral at the corner of Dunsmuir and Richards streets on Sunday afternoon.
Five Knights of Columbus blocked the top of the church's steps, backed by a handful of Vancouver Police officers, as first nations survivors of Canada's residential schools and their supporters demanded an audience with the members of the church.
At around 3 p.m., Craig Langston shifted from his wheelchair to the bottom step leading to the cathedral. Behind him, protesters read a statement denouncing the church's "occupation on Squamish Nation land," as the Knights listened on.
Midway through the statement, the Knights countered the protest with a statement of their own: open and vocal prayer.
"We want them to acknowledge their part in our history as aboriginal people," Langston said. "The response we're getting is they're blocking us."
Langston said his mother went to a residential school in Alberta. She died in 1987 "because of alcohol," he said, an outcome he attributed to her time spent in the school.
Langston, a Burnaby resident, said he grew up in the foster system after he lost his mother. "I am a survivor of the residential school system," he said, adding that the cathedral protest sprung up out of Occupy Vancouver.
Occupy Vancouver was not directly involved in the protest, said Reid Hart, a participant in the Occupy movement. "The General Assembly last night [Saturday] decided not to participate in it," he said.
On Saturday afternoon, approximately 300 protesters took to Vancouver's streets demanding that G20 leaders institute a "Robin Hood tax" on currency trading and speculative financial transactions.
Marchers called for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to support the tax while meeting with other G20 leaders in France this week.
While marshalling at the Vancouver Art Gallery beforehand, demonstrators were given a short history of the tax and then briefly debated its merits and possibilities.
"The main proposal out there is for a tax of a fraction of a per cent ... on transactions of stocks, on foreign exchange and financial derivatives," explained Canadian Union of Public Employees economist Toby Sanger to a cheering crowd. "There's $600 trillion worth of financial derivatives out there, the value of the global economy each year is $60 trillion.
"So, most of that is being used for speculation, and that was a big cause of the financial crisis that we've gone through."
Sanger added, "the idea is from a small tax like this - it could generate hundreds of billions of dollars."
Taxes would be collected nationally and half the money would go directly to each national government. The other half would go into a fund built to combat poverty and climate change, he said.
"The incentives here are all wrong - you screw up the economy so you get a big tax break? The rest of us have to pay for it twice over? That's not fair and it's not good economics," Sanger said to reporters after his speech.
Contact: mhager@postmedia.com
Contact: eduggan@vancouversu
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