Carleton student Mohamad Ghossein was one of hundreds who gathered June 10 at the rally protesting Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s policies.
He didn’t shout. He wasn’t holding a sign. He wasn’t angry.
Instead, the 22-year-old master’s student was invited to attend by a friend and said he went because he merely wanted to observe.
“I was really interested in the demands because these [issues] are things that we hear about all the time,” Ghossein said. “It’s hard to not find someone being critical of Harper’s ‘anti-democratic’ policies.”
These demands “were genuine and credible, and I wanted to see [them] manifested on the street,” he added.
The rally, which started at Dundonald Park, wound its way through the downtown core until protesters reached the Ottawa Convention Centre, where Harper was delivering an address to party delegates.
At least 400 people attended — from graduate students to seniors, Ghossein said — and this reflected the diversity of interests represented. Issues of contention ranged from the domestic, such as the Conservatives’ funding cuts to sexual assault centres, to the foreign, such as Canada’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It wasn’t a homogeneous group of people,” he said. “You could say it was all over the place, but that was the intention in the first place.”
Ghossein said he stayed for the first half of the protest and was in the crowd for most of this time. Many police officers were taking pictures, he said, and some officials — he thinks they were RCMP, but isn’t positive — were standing on top of cars and photographing specific individuals.
“There were lenses everywhere,” he said. “In my face, in everyone’s face, everywhere you turned.”
While some of the protesters were obviously angry, the rally was peaceful overall, Ghossein said. Some people were shouting and wearing bandannas, but Ghossein said he’s certain these individuals were not organizers and speculates that they were just there to agitate the crowd.
When the photo-taking started to make Ghossein feel “uncomfortable,” he left, but not before hearing a speech by Brigitte DePape, the Senate page who was fired for holding up a “Stop Harper” sign during the June 3 Throne Speech. In her speech, DePape made comparisons between the rally and the current demonstrations by democratic protesters in the Middle East, Ghossein said.
While Ghossein said he thinks there is a tendency to oversimplify and even romanticize these conflicts, “the circumstances are different, but the demands are always fundamentally the same.”
A rally like the one he observed is the best way to protest the government, he added.
“They upheld peace, they were very civil,” he said.
“They were exercising their democratic rights.”
Check out more photos from the protest in our web gallery: https://charlatan.ca/gallery
