Mark Blevis

The NoProrogue monitoring dashboard

It was a slow start… crowds were small, there was an attempt to lead a series of long and complicated chants, one of the speakers yelled at rather than spoke to crowd and a Nortel employee opened her speech with “I’m a Nortel employee so I know something about the Internet.” From my desk at home (where I was also working on an RFP), I wasn’t convinced that Ottawa’s contribution to the cross-Canada rallies against proroguing Parliament was going to help make the Facebook group-initiated day of protest remarkable.

Ottawa, indeed Canada, is just too stiff when it comes to rallies. It’s tough getting people out for any side of any cause and in the rallying mood once they’re there (especially when most of the city was enjoying the first great day of skating on the Canal). You need something to stir the crowd up. In the case of yesterday’s rally in Ottawa, there were too many inexperienced opening acts.

Then Trevor Strong of The Arrogant Worms took the stage. ”If I’m at a rally, something’s gone horribly wrong,” he said. Suddenly the gathering of an estimated 4,000 people (RCMP figures) became a rally that chanted Trevor into an encore after his song The Proroguer. Name a rally in Ottawa that encored one of its presenters.

THE BEGINNING OF THE CURVE

However, the real story isn’t the two-hour rally with student speakers, celebrity singers and party leaders. The story is that a national day of protest organized on Facebook managed to get in excess of 27,000 people rallying in cities across the country and even in major cities in the U.S. and U.K. All of the politicians and critics that thought an online gathering was cute now find themselves having to acknowledge that digital advocacy and engagement is on track to help shape our country’s government — with or without their participation.

And that’s not all. Digital tools played a significant communication role during the event. Protesters used the #noprorogue tag in Twitter, incorporated live blogging technology (which also aggregated all tagged Twitter posts), uploaded photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube, and video of the Ottawa event was live streamed to the Internet. Canadians are making this an important issue and the media has had to be a part of that or be left behind by democratized media. That certainly made it easy for observers like me.

MISSING VOICE

One aspect of the prorogued Parliament that isn’t getting much attention is the pro-proroguing opinion. Maybe one hundred prorogue supporters have been working the comments section of CBC.ca reports on the rallies, dismissing the participation rates at the rallies as being pathetic and representing less than one have of one per cent of Canada’s population.

If the measure of the popular opinion is numbers in Facebook groups and real world rallies, there is apparently no support for proroguing Parliament. [Note: a group calling itself Canadians Against 'Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament' has appeared on Facebook today. It has 47 members at the time of this post.]

IT TAKES ONE PERSON TO START SOMETHING

That’s the thing about Canada: drumming up participation and coordinated efforts for any side of any issue is incredibly difficult. Canadians, whether content or angry, just aren’t bred to rock the boat. Which makes Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament an incredible success. The Facebook group managed to convert roughly 13% of the digital participation in to a coordinated real world rally that spanned the country and the world — all because of one person, Christopher White, a student in Calgary.

Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament can now take comfort in the fact that their detractors made significant miscalculations and have a busy week ahead of them.