Marching Between What’s Right and What’s Left

QUEBEC CITY —  At the intersection of Boulevard Charest Est and Rue de la Couronne, the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators outside the Summit of the Americas on Saturday faced a choice. It was symbolic, and it was real.

To the left, Rue de la Couronne led steeply up to the Old City. There stood the fence that had become the symbol, to the demonstrators, of the division between the 34 summit leaders and the people.

“To the left, to the left. Not to the right--to the left,” a clutch of demonstrators chanted, alternating between English and French.

Marc Theroux, with hundreds of others, turned left.

He followed a banner that read: “Fight for Democracy. Aux barricades! To the FENCE!” An arrow pointed left.

“I want to see where the fence is. I want to know what it looks like. I want to know why they build a thing like that for a demonstration that’s peaceful,” said Theroux, a member of the Canadian Auto Workers union who works for VIA Rail, the Canadian passenger train system.

To the right went the approximately three-mile route laid out for a peaceful protest march. It wended beneath a highway overpass and through a flat neighborhood of tired-looking duplexes, warehouses and factories--distant in geography and in its layer of working-class grit from the charm of the hilltop old Quebec.

On the heights, the summit met behind the chain-link and concrete barrier made all the more effective by plumes of tear gas. The fumes seeped down, their angry sting permeating distant reaches in waves.

Rene Savard, 45, a member of the Canadian postal workers union, who was as angry as Theroux over the prospects of increased free trade championed by the summit, turned right.

“This direction is peaceful,” he said, walking with his wife and teenage daughter.

So too did thousands of others--close to 30,000, according to police--a group so large that it took perhaps two hours to pass.

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The symbols of the day were unavoidable. Before the marchers set out, they listened to two hours of speeches at a staging ground near the old train station. Just beyond sat a line of silos and two large freighters tied up at the St. Lawrence River docks. The ships and storage sites were in-your-face reminders that this city was built on trade--it was a shipping point for French fur trappers in the 17th century--and that trade still makes its mark here.

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Organizers of the march and rally conceded that there was an undercurrent of tension between those who wanted to charge the barricades--and retreat amid the clouds of tear gas that would follow--and those who wanted to make their points without confrontation.

“Welcome to the revolution,” said Maude Barlow, chairwoman of the Council of Canadians, an umbrella group at the front of the protests. She recognized the dichotomy in her remarks to the rally.

“We are a movement that believes in nonviolence,” said Barlow, who more than 20 years ago was a senior aide to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. But she sympathized with the younger people confronting the police.

“They are people born in a society in which we have a toxic economy, in which we have winners and losers, in which we don’t care what happens to our young people . . . with no access to the halls of power other than putting their bodies on the line.”

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The rally was a monument to hemispheric diversity, save for the common theme of opposition to the summit’s goal of creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

There was a tribal leader from British Columbia, a Canadian actor, the leader of a federation of indigenous people in Ecuador.

Representing a French wing, Jose Bove, a farmer who gained attention with an attack on a McDonald’s restaurant in France, predicted that “peasants throughout the world” will join the “struggle against this free-trade agreement.”

They heaped scorn on the notion that expanded trade will lift the poor and that the meeting itself is really about expanding justice and democracy.

“All that stuff is meant to be a smoke screen,” said Tony Clarke, the Council of Canadians’ vice chair. “What we have here is the replacement of the national security state with the corporate security state.”

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At Surplus Plein Air, an outdoor and military-style goods emporium on the route of the march, manager Pascal Legendre sells three, perhaps five, gas masks a week to people trying to protect themselves from paint fumes.

On Saturday he sold 110.

“It was a good day,” he said.

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All the angry language could not diminish the softness of the day, with the temperature hovering around 70. Clearly spring had arrived. That meant that snow, gone from the streets, sat in shrinking dirt-caked piles just beyond the parking lots. Although their branches showed no sign of it, there was a rumor that the trees would turn green. Opening day at the baseball stadium was nearing.

And one marcher carried this pleasant message: “The earth is sacred.” Her sign was taped to a hockey stick.

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At the end of the march, where the lines at the portable beer taps and toilets were equally long, Lee Dlugin and Pat Barile were clearly tired but seemed exhilarated. Their black standard poodle was rambunctious. On Friday, they had made the 12-hour trip from Jersey City, N.J., in an aging Oldsmobile.

“More than anything else, we have to put an end to these super-government agencies controlled by the monopoly corporations that dictate the lives of every citizen,” Dlugin said, while her husband, Barile, wearing a New York Mets cap, reined in Tuffy, the unkempt poodle.

“It’s so gorgeous,” she said, referring not so much to the spring weather as to the political climate. “The turnout has been fantastic. You can tell the people are really angry . . . at the corporate control of all aspects of life.”

Asked whether she was retired or working, she said, almost sheepishly, “Yeah, I work.”

Her employer? The Communist Party of the United States. She is the vice chairwoman and international secretary.

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As the marchers reached their destination and retraced their steps toward the center of the city, Geoff Bickerton, 49, a member of the postal workers union from Ottawa, was headed toward the fence.

Several hours earlier, when he approached the intersection of Charest Est and De la Couronne, he turned right.

“It’s very clear this will be a peaceful march, not one where we’d be subjected to gassing by the police,” he said at the time.

Why had he turned back now, toward the police?

Not politics. It was a generational thing.

“Now my 14-year-old is demanding to go up to the wall,” Bickerton said. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”