
This past Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of watching Ezra Levant being told to fuck off, oblige, and nervously waddle down Vancouver’s Sunset Beach—away from an increasingly agitated protest against the Northern Gateway pipeline.Ezra decided to show up and stir the pot at the last big ‘No Enbridge’ rally to be held before the federal government makes its decision on the controversial pipeline sometime in mid-June. Everyone fully expects Harper’s decision to be “go for it,” and this protest—which had sister rallies across the country—was seen among many as the last legal show of force to be made, before shovels break ground, and Enbridge gets cracking on its $7 billion dollar west-coast bitumen funnel.
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While Unist’ot’en supporters were in attendance, no one from the actual camp was there, or they at least weren’t letting their presence be known. Sources who we spoke with close to Unist’ote’n, however, informed us they’d been down just days before and had driven back up with new lumber and resources to what Unist’ot’en sees as the frontlines, and, as one person put it to me, is the “end game” of what all this protesting boils down to.Rising Tide has been offering training workshops—like how to chain yourself to heavy machinery—to prepare people for a more disruptive protest. I had a conversation with ‘Matthew Gibbons,’ who was adamant that real organization and collaboration between First Nations, environmental groups, and everyday concerned citizens was essential to make something happen.“I think it means having thousands of people who are prepared to be arrested by shutting down highways, bridges, infrastructures, where it’s built, locking onto machines, investigating these companies, figuring out all the different links to this chain and taking action against the companies is where we go.” When it came to how to coordinate all of this, his plan started to sound a bit more convoluted. But the spirit is there.Thankfully, Saturday’s rally remained peaceful, and a few pro-oil dudes did a good job of keeping their cool by answering questions while being terribly berated. That said, however, tension rose steadily throughout the day as Mr. Levant made his rounds. By about 5PM, things were heated. The crowd grew larger, closer to Ezra, and more intense. Somewhere throughout the course of his final confrontational conversation, Ezra had to stand on a driftwood log to avoid backing into activists. When he was loudly challenged for being biased, and called out on his book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, he finally quit it and wrapped up his routine by blowing an instigative kiss to the crowd, pirouetted off of his log, and, as mentioned earlier, waddled away with his cameraman in tow. @ddner