Resistance in the Streets

Jackie Larkin (Women Against the Budget) [00:00:01] There’s no other example in B.C. history, and you’d be having to go back a few decades, quite a few decades to find a similar example in Canadian history of the level of popular mobilization. Willingness to take direct action, like walk off the job or to do occupations, or whatever it was. I was thinking about the occupation that was done in the Premier’s office too, which we have skipped over. But that was pretty amazing.

Mervyn Van Steinberg (Unemployment Action Centre coordinator) [00:00:29] Well it was the one rally, but there was lots of organizing around the Solidarity as a whole. I mean, the interesting thing for me about the Solidarity, Operation Solidarity and that whole movement was the amount of community kind of organizing that went on. It was a, it was a movement where people had, you know, had signs in their windows, had signs on their lawns. People wore the buttons to the Safeway when they were getting gas, that kind of stuff. You’d seen, you know, the Solidarity button and the Coalition button and that kind of stuff all over the community and I don’t necessarily remember lots of protests like that. I mean, I know that I’ve seen buttons from other protests and signs and so on, but this was pretty uniform. People were were quite engaged, so there’s a lot organized into that. There also was, for our purposes, one of the things that happened in the Kelowna area is naturally, we were dealing with unemployed people and, and busy dealing with all kinds of questions and issues. As I said earlier, they come up for them, and the Centre became, they became a drop in centre as well, and became a place, a focal point for them. They’d come in and have coffee and we, you know, have some day old doughnuts from the local doughnut store. That kind of stuff. So, it was a place for them to drop in and kind of meet and they got to know about unions.

Stuart Alcock (Representative for Gay Men, Solidarity Coalition) [00:01:53] And we did, through the Solidarity Coalition, organize an event for the gay community at the West End Community Centre and we had a panel and a good number of people in the audience. Two, three hundred maybe. Nobody at that event stood up and said you shouldn’t be doing this. There was a real sense of, you know, we are upset with the government of the day.