from the op/ed pages of today's paper

One way to get rid of the occutards

Here’s a surreptitious solution to the Occupy squatters

Cosy in their high-tech microfibre, lofted sleeping bags atop self-inflating sleeping pads, the Occupy Calgary squatters at Olympic Plaza only seem to be missing some Sherpa guides as they prepare to settle in for winter.
Better equipped than an Everest base camp, and only a few steps from the convenience of hot coffee and shawarma, they crawled from their sewn-in-China tents of ripstop nylon on Wednesday and trekked over to nearby St. Patrick’s Island to berate a group of chronically homeless into not co-operating with The Man.
As social assistance advocates attempted to convince the homeless camp at St. Patrick’s Island to move into shelters, the occupiers intervened, convincing them to stay. It was appalling. Recruiting the vulnerable into their anti-capitalist crusade was the last straw.
As Tim Richter, the smart, passionate head of the Calgary Homeless Foundation noted: “I think it’s pretty easy for people who have a couple of hundred dollars worth of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear to say they’re going to stay out all winter. To me, it’s pretty rich for someone (like that) to tell a guy who’s been homeless for 10 years, or a woman who is homeless while she has medical problems, or a woman who is homeless and has kids in foster care, that sleeping outside in the winter is OK because we gotta stay with a global cause.”
The problem now is what to do with the Olympic Plaza squatters. Sending in police vans is exactly what they want — a made-for-TV media spectacle that will prove they are being subjugated by the system. The strong-arm approach hasn’t worked in the three cities where it has been tried. In Oakland, Chicago and Melbourne, the occupiers simply came back in greater numbers.
Instead, here’s what the City of Calgary should do — go into Olympic Plaza at 3 a.m. with an infrared camera and confiscate any tent that is not occupied. It would be a justifiable enforcement of the bylaw that prohibits camping in city parks without a permit. In 20 minutes, you could probably clear out 80 per cent of the tents. In London, the always-clever corporate British media used infrared cameras and found that most occupiers went home to a warm bed at night.
The Occupy movement is becoming an embarrassment. In Vancouver, rats have moved in among the occupiers on the lawn in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Occupy Calgary should be thankful that in Alberta, The Man has a program that keeps rats out of this province.
The Vancouver group is not even ashamed that they’ve derailed Santa Claus. The annual Santa parade has been rerouted because Occupy Vancouver has co-opted the space where a local bank sets up bleachers and collects donations for the food bank.
Berating the homeless. Taking food from the poor. Opposing Santa Claus. That’s some legacy. The occupiers might consider voting. Or volunteering. Or changing the system from within.
In the meantime, we are a society that believes in the rule of law. It’s part of “the system” that provides our freedoms and rights — the very system that the squatters are now abusing. The city is arguing that it may violate the Charter to remove the squatters. What nonsense. Nowhere in the Charter does it give people the right to pitch a tent wherever they want.
However officials do it, the city should uphold the law. It’s what we pay our taxes for.

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