Longtime protest organizer Ivan Drury to lead 'anti-RCMP checkpoint' in Surrey on Thursday
Credit to Author: David Carrigg| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2020 05:45:19 +0000
Protesters will rally in front of the RCMP’s E-Division headquarters in Surrey on Thursday to support the continuing Wet’suwet’en blockade in Northern B.C.
In a statement released on Wednesday night, longtime protester Ivan Drury said supporters of the Wet’suwet’en Nation would be enforcing the “Indigenous rule of law” by setting up an “anti-RCMP checkpoint” outside the RCMP E-Division headquarters.
On Monday, the RCMP blocked access to three Wet’suwet’en camps (one permanent) along the Morice West Forest Service Road (west of Houston) that are preventing Coastal GasLink workers from accessing their work site further up the one-way road. Coastal GasLink are building a natural gas pipeline between Dawson Creek and Kitimat through Wet’suwet’en territorial lands. They have struck access deals with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation that controls a reserve near Burns Lake, B.C., but not with the hereditary chiefs.
The RCMP have moved in at the company’s request, backed by a Supreme Court of B.C. court injunction ordering Wet’suwet’en members and supporters to allow the work to carry on.
On Wednesday, Wet’suwet’en chiefs called on B.C. Premier John Horgan to meet them, a day after Horgan promised the pipeline would go ahead and was needed to fuel the $40 billion Canada LNG project underway in Kitimat.
Also on Wednesday, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Dsahayl asked Coastal GasLink workers near Parrot Lake Village to leave the area (they complied) and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs argued the RCMP checkpoint and exclusion zone violated Indigenous and Canadian law by blocking access to traditional territory.
The RCMP set up a checkpoint on the Morice West Forest Service Road on Jan. 13, 2020, as tensions mount between five hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and a gas pipeline company.
Drury’s first major protest action was in 2002 when he led for a while a group of people who occupied the old Woodwards building in the Downtown Eastside to demand it be turned into social housing. More recently he appeared at a homeless camp in Maple Ridge that was shut down by police. In 2016, Drury was dragged by force from a tent city that was set up in Thornton Park in Vancouver. In 2017 he staged a sit-in in Burnaby city hall protesting rental evictions from low-rise buildings being demolished for high rises.
The protest at the RCMP E-Division’s Green Timbers Way headquarters starts at 1 p.m.
In the prepared statement, Drury said the rally would start with speakers, “before a more disruptive direct action.”