Canadian Geese

by a co-conspirator

This was the first original poster we did, I’ll have to look up the press articles on it to get the exact date, but it was sometime prior to Feb 28, 1990 obviously. I kinda thought it was in the fall of the previous year, but no guarantees on that.

The group I work with in Kingston is called Action for Social Change (ASC). We had been working with the Alliance for Non-Violent Action (ANVA, a regional group) for about five years in solidarity with the Innu Nation of Nitassinan (Labrador on the East coast of Canada).

The Innu were fighting low-level flights over their unceded homeland by jets from the Goose Bay military base. This is a Canadian Forces base but the gov’t of Canada also gave flight time to other NATO nations there. The noise and dummy bomb drops from the flights were wreaking havoc with the animal and human life in the region, hence doubly affecting the Innu traditional lifestyle in the bush.

The Innu used civil disobedience to block the flights (invading the runways) and ANVA and ASC participated in cd actions in Ottawa and ASC did one in Kingston in support of the Innu demands to stop the flights. The posters were our attempt to bring the war home to Kingstonians — it worked.

The phone numbers on the posters are 1) the local Canadian Froces base number and (2) the local member of Parliament’s number. By early morning of poster day the MP’s secretary had received 200 calls. The base had to bring in extra personnel to answer the phones.

The following year we put up a similar poster (new phone numbers) in the nation’s capital (Ottawa) the night before a mass cd with ANVA and Innu people blockading the Department of National Defence HQ. The poster got the front page that morning, the action, the next morning.