Taking a Page from the Senate

In which the nation's commentariat urges a young woman to sit down and shut up.

Brigette DePape's protest has turned the 21-year-old University of Ottawa grad into a political Rorschach test à la Barack Obama, in that people (if you can call columnists that) see in her what they want to see: either a pinko with no respect for her former employer or a brave protester sacrificing her job to mark her displeasure with the current regime, all based on a photo of her holding a stop sign.

Kelly McParland of the National Post, for example, describes her as “cute as a button” before assuming she must have skipped classes on democracy “to strap herself to the stack of a coal-fired power plant” and throwing all sorts of lazy jabs about activists her way (“What next for Ms. DePape? Bungee-jumping from the CN Tower in support of more bike lanes? Careening from floe to floe as she personally rescues baby seals?”). That, or she skipped classes because she was getting experience in democracy first-hand by interning in the Senate, we might add.

Heather Mallick takes a ridiculously different attitude in the Toronto Star, agreeing with DePape's assertion that Canada needs an "Arab Spring" (the lone part of her protest that we consider ill-advised). “I have never heard the Harper-managed Canadian slide into backwater status put more eloquently,” says Mallick, who apparently never read this. “She’s bright, she’s brave, she made her stand. If that makes her elitist – Harper’s favourite pejorative – so be it.” DePape's protest took courage, but she nearly lost us by comparing the plight of young Canadians to that of millions of oppressed men and women across the Arab world who are sacrificing their lives just to ask for the right to vote.

Tim Powers refuses to name the page in The Globe and Mail, all but calling her an egotist: “Our mini Michael Moore executed her stunt with a similar flare for the dramatic and made sure she was the star of the show,” says Powers. “Debate and protest are vital things in a vibrant democracy. But so is telling the truth, such as acknowledging when a stunt is a vehicle for shameless self-promotion.” That might be the case if she was hawking T-shirts, but all she was selling was a simple message of protest.