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- Front of Harper’s Bus
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- A view of Harper’s Bus
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- Side of Harper’s Bus
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- Back of Harper’s Bus
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- A few of the victims.
OTTAWA : 11 am, 26 September, 2014, Grounds of the Supreme Court of Canada
The Ottawa Raging Grannies have constructed a monument to all victims “thrown under the bus” by the Harper government. The large blue cardboard bus is labelled Monument to the Victims of C, and popped up near the proposed site of a monument to the Victims of Communism.
A sign next to the bus read “Dedicated to all the victims thrown under the Harper bus.” The bus, driven by Stephen Harper, had an “Out of Service” sign on the front, and the license plate read “Oil #1”. Victims’ feet extended from under it, with toe tags identifying them. Some of the victims identified were Veterans, Environmental Protection, CBC, Democracy, Native Women. But there were many more. According to Cathleen Kneen, one of the Grannies, “We had so many victims that sadly we couldn’t include them all in our monument. In fact, we made a decision not to use names of individual victims such as Nigel Wright, because the list is so long.”
The Grannies built the monument for two reasons:
First, they hope it will remind Canadians of the many, many victims thrown under the bus by Harper. “The number is overwhelming,” said Raging Granny Ria Heynen. “As we identified Harper’s victims, we were saddened by how many of them are highly valued by Canadians. We hope people will not forget them when it comes time for the next election.”
Second, the Grannies hope that their prototype monument will inspire abandonment of the Harper government’s plan for a Monument to the Victims of Communism in the Supreme Court precincts, instead of the planned third building for the Federal Court. This proposed monument has a price tag of four million dollars, and would greatly detract from the symbolic importance of the site, not to mention the irony of building such a monument after signing a free-trade agreement with China.