As Ben Powless walks through Confederation Park on a pleasant October afternoon, he’s struck by the stark difference between now and a decade ago.
“It’s almost hard to believe that it happened,” he says, as people sip coffee at the outdoor bistro and chit-chat next to the refurbished fountain.
“I look around and it’s like, I don’t even recognize things.”
Ten years ago, Powless was among scores of protesters — many getting their first taste of activism — who descended on the park to voice their simmering discontent with the concentration of global wealth in the pockets of a privileged few.
It was on that day, Oct. 15, 2011, that the Occupy movement officially arrived in Canada’s capital.
“There was a sense of not just participating in something here, but participating in something that felt like a global movement,” recalled Powless, an Ottawa writer and photographer who’s since travelled the world, documenting protest movements.
“It was like OK, wow, this is also happening here ... you felt like you were part of something much bigger.”
That summer, the Occupy movement and its signature rallying cry, “We are the 99 per cent,” took off in cities across North America.
It started in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, in the heart of New York’s financial district, with a small group of protesters calling themselves “Occupy Wall Street.”
Occupy Wall Street would grow into the thousands, igniting similar protests in communities both around North America and across the globe.
In Ottawa, protesters marched on Parliament Hill that first day, then returned to set up an encampment at the park, which is run by the National Capital Commission (NCC). They would stay for more than a month.
“It felt like a very bold, assertive kind of action for Ottawa,” said Amanda Joy, a PhD student in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who spent many days at Confederation Park — and also some nights — supporting the movement and performing field research.
Joy helped organize some of the general assemblies, worked in the park’s communal kitchen, and interviewed people about why they’d come out.
It was a diverse group, she recalled, motivated by economic disparity and encouraged by the movement’s language.
“Saying ‘We are the 99 per cent’ really opens the door for suburban moms and dads. People would come with their parents and grandparents. People who would never have joined this kind of thing before felt welcomed,” she said.
“Watching banks get bailed out while people were suffering with unemployment and having their homes foreclosed upon really brought that home for a lot of people.”
At its peak, Powless said, more than 100 people were showing up each day. He recalled how he’d wake up each morning, surprised by the fact the momentum hadn’t evaporated.
“There were people here who were passionate about unhoused people. There were people here who were passionate about Indigenous issues, environmental issues,” he said.
“It was a palpable sense that this is unique, this is something that hasn’t probably been tried before … maybe ever, here.”
Over time, however, that momentum began to dissipate.
As the weeks went on, attendance at the park began to dwindle. The focus shifted to occupying the park itself, Joy said, a direction not everyone agreed with — and one that led to an “internal reckoning.”
“We got very attached to the idea of occupation, and that the camp was the centre of the movement,” she said.
“But the trouble is that a camp like that is not sustainable in an Ottawa winter, or just long term, because it’s so resource-intensive. And so it would have been nice to see the movement shift toward other kinds of tactics.”
At the same time, police were dealing with the dual challenges of investigating complaints from within the encampment while not always being welcomed there, recalled Vern White, a senator who was Ottawa’s police chief in 2011.
“We started to get complaints from inside the encampment that people felt unsafe,” White recalled. “So that was probably one of our bigger concerns — whether or not people were able to complain to police if they wanted to.”
Five weeks after the camp went up, and with winter approaching, the NCC issued eviction notices to the park’s remaining protesters.
Police moved in early on the morning of Nov. 23 to clear the site of its roughly 25 remaining occupants.
Eight people were ticketed for trespassing. One person was injured.
“I never felt it was personal. And I think they were expressing themselves,” said White.
“As I say often, in Canada, we expect people to have the right to express themselves. I don’t have to agree with what they say, but I certainly agree with their opportunity and their ability to say it.”
Both then and now, opinions about the Occupy movement’s legacy have been varied.
Dalton McGuinty, Ontario’s then-premier, described it as an “awakening” for both the general population and those in positions of power.
Others at the time questioned what policies the movement had actually influenced, with one Carleton University expert wondering if anyone would even be talking about it a year later.
For Joy, Occupy laid groundwork for subsequent movements like Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and the popularity in the U.S. of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. It also changed the way people talk about income inequality, she said.
“This way of speaking about things gives us an idea of the basis of solidarity between the great majority of us. And we still see that language being used today, 10 years later,” Joy said.
Both Joy and Powless say they know people for whom Occupy Ottawa launched them into the world of activism. Sitting on a bench in the park, Powless says Occupy’s legacy isn’t seen in specific policy shifts—a common criticism of the movement—but rather in the “intertwined” way issues like homelessness, Indigenous rights and the environment are now seen.
“It also feels like that same day. It was a cool October day that things started, a beautiful sunny day,” he said.
“And at the same time it feels like there’s nothing that’s stopping this from happening again.”
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