This isn’t the Great Depression. We have not been through a great war which has left millions displaced. Yet, were you to visit some parks in the City of Vancouver, you might conclude otherwise. For nearly a month dozens of “Squatters�, mostly people who might best be described as professional nuisances, have been occupying’ Vancouver’s CRAB Park, living there as though it were a campground. This is not the first time that this has happened: in recent months and years other groups of so-called “protestors� have seized other public parks and areas. The occupation of CRAB Park began after a group of these filthy, ragged thugs were ejected from Victory Square, a park which contains Vancouver’s war memorial. Others protestors have seized control of Vancouver’s Creekside Park, right in the heart of the city. Last fall they seized the Woodward’s Building, a Vancouver landmark, and lived there for several months. Elsewhere other protestors have seized houses, and one group lived upon the lawn of the Provincial Legislature for nearly a month before being ejected. I expect that, in a few weeks, they will be living on the Ice at GM Place as well. No decisive action was taken to combat this plague at the outset and, consequently, it has spread. The result is that many of us in British Columbia now find ourselves, as commentator David Frum once said of another Province, living in one of the later chapters of an Ayn Rand novel.

One of the main problems in this case is that, in a fit of collective insanity, the voters of Vancouver elected a band of radical left-wingers to virtually all of the positions on the Vancouver Soviet… err… City Council. You see COPE (the Coalition of ‘Progressive’ Electors) had never won an election in Vancouver before, nor did they really have high hopes for winning, except for the fact that a popular former City Coroner (upon whose life a popular television show was based) decided to run for Mayor on their ticket at the last minute. As a result, not much thought seems to have gone into COPE’s nomination process. They didn’t even run a full slate of candidates, which presumably means that any nut who wanted to run under their banner got to. Because of this there were a number of people elected to the City Council who I wouldn’t trust to check my coat lest they steal it as an act of protest (it’s possible: once, in Vancouver, some bum stole my suit from the car it was in). The City Administration, therefore, is having a hard time removing the protestors because many of its leading members would actually feel much more comfortable living in the park with them.

There are lessons here for people in other cities- and they must be learned, for our little revolutionary encampment is earning attention all over the world. A recent news report featured protestors who had come from as far away as Germany and Pennsylvania, all to live in one of our public parks. It will not be long before these people return home with nifty new concepts for lawbreaking swimming in their heads. If we fail to act here, it will not be long before we have scum like this living in all of our parks, discarding their needles and publicly defecating in the same places our children are supposed to be playing.

All of the relevant authorities have, in this case, abdicated their responsibility to defend the people against those without respect for the law. We cannot have a civil society if we have one set of laws for some people and another for those who claim to act in the name of “social justice� (or whatever euphemistic name they have developed for their socialist ideals). Seizing a public park, one paid for and meant for the use of the public, is illegal and wrong. Period. Given Vancouver’s already-soaring crime rates and deteriorating level of social order, we cannot tolerate such blatant violations of the law any longer. Yet the police refuse to take any action and the Vancouver Park Board, claiming a lack of staff, says that they won’t get around to ejecting these criminals until the fall. Yet every day this goes on, it grows. Every day it goes on the taxpayers are robbed just a little more, the respect for the law dips just a little more, and we drop just a little more into hell.

If a properly constituted authority neglects its responsibility for act upon laws which are necessary for the defense of the people, then the responsibility for the execution of said laws reverts to the people, upon whose consent responsible government is based. The public has never surrendered its right to safeguard its own rights and to act in its own defense. Those who would break the law should not be able to call upon its protection. It is time for these protestors to go: one way or the other.

Now, let me be very clear on this point, I am not calling for violence. The last thing on Earth that we need is for these people to have a martyr. That does not mean that this situation does not inherently contain the potential of violence for, just the other day, these great defenders of the little guy beat up someone who had the audacity to ride through a public park on his bike. These people are capable of violence against those who would seek to enforce the laws. It is a reason why the authorities are so timid, and it is also a reason why we must take it upon ourselves to defend our property if the people we elect will not.

Allowing these protestors to dictate the actions of our government is despicable. By allowing this to drag on we are sowing the seeds of a thousand violent clashes in the future. Once the radical left discovers that it no longer has to play by the rules of the game, that it may have its way by force, then it will always seek to do so. It cannot stand.

I am tempted to borrow a page out of the US Army’s playbook and suggest that we set up our own camps next door to the ones controlled by the protestors. We could play The Star Spangled Banner and The Battle Hymn of the Republic at maximum volume all night long (when the US Army pulled this stunt in Panama they used annoyingly loud rock music- but I suspect that most of these people are used to that. Better to taunt them with some songs they are certain to truly hate). After all, if they have the right to seize part of a public park and live in it, then we must have the right to play a few stereos in one as well. The problem with the music solution, of course, is time. I don’t have the time to live in a public park for days and neither, I suspect, do any of you. That’s the real problem here: we’ve got a lot of useless people with a lot of time on their hands. People, I might add, who have smaller brains than they do mouths.

We are left with just one option: we must take apart these camps ourselves. We should march on down to these parks and take down their tents, tear down their “no public access� posters, and tell these people to go and get a job. We should not do this violently- but peacefully, in great numbers. A thousand people could assemble- such an overwhelming force that they would have no choice but to stand by as we reclaim what is justly ours. If they choose to be violent against a crowd of such a size, I daresay, it will be their misfortune. We must use ‘people power’ to save our city. If these thugs wish to perform an act of civil disobedience then it is high time for the decent people of the Earth to perform an act of civil obedience.