End Occupy Now

Only Vancouver's uber-liberal Mayor (as Bill O'Reilly calls him) Gregor Robertson could waste an opportunity like this. As if Occupy Vancouver's tents, permanent structures and open drug use wasn't enough reason to shut the protest down, there has also been an overdose, a death (!) and now Vancouver police officers are being bit by the protesters. It's time to end Occupy Vancouver now. Mayor Robertson should have had the place shut down the day after the woman was found dead in her tent. What better reasoning to end this than when people start to die?

Instead, the Mayor dithered and stalled, allowing the protesters to become more belligerent and entrenched, to the point that they claim to not recognize the city's authority and even declaring their own sovereignty. Vancouver's civic politicians need to find their backbone and shut this thing down. If the Occupy Vancouver sit-in doesn't recognize the government's authority, it's about time Vancouver shows them, up close and personal, who really runs the City.

Occupy Vancouver's Run of the Mill Protest

Well, Metro Vancouver's professional agitator and activist class has another pet project to fill its time. There never seems to be a shortage of people to protest....everything. Stanley cup playoffs, safe-injection site Supreme Court rulings, beginnings of Pickton inquiries, and now corporate greed, or whatever it is they are protesting against.

And that is the big problem with the "Occupy" protests. Despite the Left's attempts to compare the protests with the Tea Party movement, there are few discernible objectives or goals of this uprising. Look at the Occupy Vancouver group's mantras: "we are the 99%," and "end corporate greed." What do those slogans mean? Nothing. Like most of these protests, Occupy Vancouver is made up of bored old hippies, entitled college kids, and aggrieved minorities and their demands run the gamut of more organic farming, less war, lower housing costs, higher taxes, arrest George Bush, Free Mark Emery, and you can guess the rest. This is typical left-wing whining about everything under the sun.

Where the Tea Party in the US took real legislative concerns (government spending and debt) and turned that into legislative accomplishments (the biggest wave election--2010's midterms--in decades), Occupy Vancouver likely won't accomplish much. And the question remains why there would be an "occupation" in Vancouver. The American protests are a result of rampant and record-high unemployment, huge government debt, record-busting deficits, and a left-wing President who has failed and crushed the expectations of his liberal supporters. I don't quite see what the parallels are in Vancouver for all these iPhone clad, Arts Degree-holding, Save-the-Whale-chanting complainers.

There are real problems facing us, what with our economy weakening and our housing market bubbling, but these occupations, whether on Wall Street or in Vancouver, are't going to do anything to move us forward.