37 Canadian cities protest war
By
G. Dunkel
Published Nov 4, 2006 12:09 AM
From St. John’s in
Newfoundland to Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and in major
cities like Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver,
thousands of Canadians and some U.S. service members seeking asylum in Canada
marched Oct. 28 to protest Canada’s 2,500 troops now fighting around
Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
In
Calgary, the major city in Alberta and home province of Canadian Prime Minister
Stephen Harper, protesters carried signs condemning Harper and U.S. President
George W. Bush as warmongers.
In
Montreal, under a hard rain, about 500 people marched to the U.S. consulate.
Athena Skalko, 66, told a reporter for the Montreal Gazette: “I
don’t like it when Canadian people kill for no reason, for big business. I
don’t like it.”
In Halifax,
Andria Hill-Lehr said, “Right now I am ashamed of wearing a Canadian flag
on my back.” Her 22-year-old son has enlisted and is scheduled to go to
Afghanistan in November. She continued, “I want to send an absolutely
clear message: There is a clear divide between love and support for our family
members serving, but it is not synonymous with support for a political
agenda.”
The leader of the New
Democratic Party, which is a center-left party in the Canadian parliament,
marched in Toronto. He gave a TV interview in which he said that Canada’s
goals in Afghanistan are not being achieved, and Ottawa is spending much more on
the war effort than on
reconstruction.
In Ottawa,
Canada’s capital, marchers chanted, “Health care, daycare, anything
but warfare.”
Organizers felt
that the cold and rainy weather, with the first snow in some areas, kept the
numbers down.
The Collectif Échec
à la guerre; the Canadian Peace Alliance; the Canadian Labor Congress,
the Canadian equivalent of the AFL-CIO; and the Canadian Islamic Congress all
endorsed and organized for the
demonstrations.
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