There are the people in St. James Park. They put their numbers at around 500.Then there are the people behind the people in the park. I’d put their numbers in the thousands.
People like Mita Hans. She works the night shift as a counsellor in a group home for adults with disabilities. Most mornings, she pulls up to St. James Park in her little grey Hyundai on a mission.
Her daily self-prescribed task: collect 12 empty five-gallon water jugs from the pantry tent, cart them home, disinfect them with bleach, fill them with fresh tap water. She picks up a protester to help her with the heavy lifting. Sometimes, she serves them coffee.
“It’s the first time since the G20 I’ve woken up without some feeling of dread about the kind of world we’re living in,” she says.
Together, they lug the full jugs into her trunk and return them to the park.
It takes only 40 minutes a day. But three weeks into the occupation, that adds up to 1,260 gallons of water.
Little bricks make big buildings.
Walk through the park and you’ll notice changes every day. A new dining tent going up. A fat pile of donated firewood appears suddenly. The boxes of freshly printed business cards being ripped open in each committee tent, which even the occupiers find richly ironic, but “the revolution has to start in this system.”
All of this raises the question — where is this stuff coming from?
The unions are the biggest benefactors. A group of seven — lead by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union and the Canadian Labour Congress — paid for and installed the line of porta-potties, the humming generators, the three elegant Mongolian tents that went up last weekend, and more. Their biggest donation to date rolled onto an empty lot a block north of the park this Wednesday: a gleaming 28-foot mobile kitchen, equipped with gas stoves, deep fryers, a chrome fridge and gaping freezer (not that they’ll need that). It’s the permanent solution to the occupiers’ perennial cooking quandary, and it comes at a price of $8,500 a month, parking included.
“No left-wing group has ever been able to get something like this going,” Ontario Public Service Employees Union president Smokey Thomas told me. “We think it’s terrific. We want them to be safe and comfortable…. I was young once.”
I can hear right-wingers like Sun columnist Ezra Levant cackling. But the occupy movement isn’t a puppet for big labour. Its support cables are many and varied.
Stand by the food tent for a morning. Watch the woman in a grey, haut-couture skirt charge into the kitchen, rolling up her sleeves.
Watch Mike Myers pull up in his wife’s black SUV, loaded down with 250 compostable bags of water. He runs a waste-water technology company in Burlington. He might be part of the 1 per cent, he says. But he supports the protest – both philosophically and financially.
“There needs to be a correction of how global financial businesses work. Something is wrong,” he says. “Hopefully, this helps them buy more time to keep pressure up until something more concrete comes out of it.”
Pieces of straw line the paths wandering through the park now. They were a gift from John Cummins, the president of a hydraulics company in Newmarket. When he heard the tents were getting soggy after a recent rain, he picked up 50 bales from a local farmer and hauled them down to St. James Park.
“I think it’s right what they are complaining about,” he told me. “They want a voice. They want to have authentic jobs that have meaning.”
Bookstores donated the tomes that fill the library, now housed in one of the Mongolian tents. The Bloor Street United church offered its kitchen to Occupy cooks two nights a week.
“The park creates a space for a different type of political discourse that our society doesn’t cater to,” says Vasilios Cranis, the 32-year-old former manager of the Lula Lounge who persuaded the restaurant owners to open their kitchen to the Occupiers. “Even if nothing comes of it, that alone has value.”
There are other types of support cables. The dean of St. James Anglican cathedral, which abuts the growing camp, has been vocal in his support for the protesters. There are the groups of students who wander the camp studying democracy as it unfolds there – legitimizing the movement. And then the people like Derek Shaw who arrive each day to take part in the bubbling conversation.
Shaw is a 50-year-old supply teacher with mounting bills. He’s back at school, training to be a paralegal. He dropped in during his lunch break, lugging a bulky briefcase.
“I am part of a very distinguished and proud society. It’s called the 99 per cent,” he declared to the circle of people gathered outside the metal gazebo for a recent noon general assembly. “The government is about to spend $145 billion on the military. Who are we fighting?”
My point: Mayor Rob Ford has announced he is “working on a plan” for St. James Park. I suspect it does not entail delivering sleeping bags and solar panels. If he cues the police to empty the park, he will incite a real revolution in this city.
Five hundred bodies occupy the park. Thousands are holding them there.
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Source: Toronto Star
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