Scrappy protesters never say die

Jeff Green | Jul 29, 2010

Author Margaret Atwood attended  a Prison Farm protest in Ottawa in the month of June.

It was sometime in the spring of 2009 when the protest against closing the farms at Kingston prisons began to build strength.

A public meeting was held at St. Lawrence College. It featured politicians, officials from Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), as well as representatives from farming groups and people who work in the prisons.

The hall where the meeting was held was packed with opponents of the closure. Two things were immediately apparent. The opponents were full of conviction, and they were a diverse mix of rural and urban people. The prison farm issue had unified the regional membership of the National Farmers Union, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and the Frontenac Cattlemen's Assocation. But that was not all. Anti -poverty and other social activists from Kingston, the John Howard Society, prison workers and their union officials, and ex-convicts were also well represented in the audience.

A senior official from the CSC was peppered with questions, and it is fair to say he did not sway any minds with his answers. He did make it clear, however, that the decision to close the farms was not subject to review. The CSC and their political bosses in the federal government had made their decision and the only thing left to do was implement it.

The only role that seemed viable for the public, aside from trying to pressure the Harper government to reverse its decision, which from the start seemed unlikely at best, was to ensure that the farmland at the Pittsburgh and Frontenac prisons did not get turned into another Kingston subdivision. This involved keeping an eye not only on CSC but on Kingston City Council as well, because they are responsible for zoning. The land is classed as prime agricultural land, and the provincial policy statement says prime agricultural land cannot be developed for other purposes. If farmers in Frontenac County cannot sell their prime agricultural land for development, the federal government could be similarly restricted. The CSC has now said they have no intention of selling the lands.

Over the past 16 months several things have happened. The abattoir at the Pittsburgh Institution, which is a privately run, commercial operation, will remain open even if prisoners no longer work there. This satisfied one of the prime concerns of the farming organizations.

At the same time, the closure of the prison farms has proceeded at a measured but unwavering pace and the protesters have not gone away.

Not long after the meeting at St. Lawrence, the protest committee announced that they were taking their fight to the national level, by engaging federal opposition politicians, who are always happy to oppose government policy, as well as national farm organizations.

The goal of all of this has been to engage the national media, to try and create the kind of pressure that bends the will of federal governments.

The protest has shown itself to be as resilient as it has been inventive. Musicians and celebrities with national profile have been engaged, and the national media have been paying attention on an intermittent basis. The Kingston media, particularly the Whig Standard, have provided ongoing coverage.

Nonetheless, it seemed that the whole situation was winding down. In spite of a major public rally a couple of months ago, a court challenge failed and the date for the sale of the dairy herd at the Frontenac Institution has been fixed.

But protest organizers remain determined. A rally was held at the regional CSC headquarters in the early morning rain last Friday July 23. The entrance way to the parking lot off King Street was blocked by a small number of protesters while others held up placards on the nearby sidewalks. CSC had issued a warning on the previous evening that they would not tolerate any interference on their property, but in the end they did not press the issue. While the police insisted upon entering the parking lot, and protesters allowed them to pass after a short delay, CSC employees did not try to park in the lot. They parked on nearby streets and walked to their offices unimpeded by the protesters.

The rally was a demonstration of the resolve of the protesters. The Frontenac herd will be sold through an online auction, and will then be moved out a few animals at a time.

Protesters vow to block the passage of those trucks, and at last Friday’s protest organizers wanted to demonstrate their willingness to engage in civil disobedience. “We did not want to stop anyone from going to work today,” said Andrew McCann, one of the organizers, on Friday, “this was really about demonstrating what we can do.”

The chances of changing the course of CSC on this remains slim, but a few other things have happened over the past year and a quarter. Farm groups have worked together on the issue and the divisions between traditional farmers and newer smaller scale farmers have been bridged. As well, all of the social and economic connections that were being made through the local food movement in Kingston over the last couple of years, and the attempt to engage more than the middle class in that movement, have been strengthened by this common cause.

St. Lawrence College, and not Queen's University, has emerged as the force behind this intellectual and social movement.

The prison farm closures are underpinned by a claim by CSC, one of the major federal agencies, that farming is no longer a viable economic practice in Canada, and this is a particularly hard political message for a government that enjoys unwavering support in rural Canada to be sending out.

But the closures may not really be about re-tooling the training programs in prisons, but about saving money and cutting out training.

In terms of prison reform, the Harper government is facing criticism by one of its strongest ideological supporters. A few weeks ago, Conrad Black, who was then a prisoner in a US jail, wrote an article in the National Post in which he lambasted the Canadian government for its “prison roadmap”, which he said abandons any pretext of rehabilitation in Canadian prisons in favour of punishment and retribution.

Black’s position dovetails with the comments made by former prison guards back at that public meeting at St. Lawrence College in March of 2009. When the CSC official said the prison farms would be replaced by alternative programming that is more in tune with today’s job market, two of them muttered, “That will never happen; they will just be sitting in their cells.”

When the Frontenac herd is shipped out, a number of people may put their bodies on the line to block the trucks, and this will lead to arrests, in the tradition of anti-nuclear and anti-globalization protests from the past.

This was far from anyone's mind that evening back at St. Lawrence College. Who could imagine that people would feel the need to get arrested to support prison farms and the underlying idea that farming remains of value in a country that was originally built up by family farms.

It is both a testament to the commitment of those scrappy prison farm protesters, and a sign of how vulnerable the very concept of growing food for sale in this country has become.

(Note – The Whig Standard reported attendance at the rally at the CSC office as 200 people or so, and CBC radio reported that “hundreds of people” arrived at the location between 7:45 and 8:30 a.m. I arrived at 7:40 and remained on scene until about 8:25. The protesters were not gathered in a single location because only a small number were blocking the driveway and thus risking arrest, so it would be hard to get an accurate count, but my observation was that the attendance was in the dozens rather than the hundreds.)