This video, by comedian Scott Vrooman, originally appeared on the Toronto Star.

American energy corporation Kinder Morgan filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against five Trans Mountain pipeline protestors in Burnaby, B.C., because apparently nobody told them the average income of a pipeline protestor.

The National Energy Board — an anagram of “regulatory capture” — ruled that the City of Burnaby can’t stop Kinder from carrying out its work, so now the protestors are accused of trespassing in their own city’s park. Kinder solved the Not In My Backyard problem by taking the backyard.

The company also claims that protestors’ angry facial expressions constitute an assault on their workers. They’re arguing that freedom of expression doesn’t extend to your face. So I assume that if protestors draw angry faces onto their butts and display those towards Kinder Morgan workers, that won’t constitute assault. And I encourage every protestor to test that theory.

All of this comes within the context of a wider attempt to delegitimize protest itself. The University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy which just installed a new oil feature in their garden it’s lovely — they recently held a conference on “social license,” where the case was made that protestors undermine the rule of law by claiming to speak for the whole community.

But pipeline and climate change protestors are mostly speaking for members of the community who don’t have a voice: children. Or they do have a voice, but they’re babbling and responding to everything with “why” and just generally saying the darndest things.

We don’t have a law that says children have a right to a livable environment when they get older. They’re expected to earn their ice sheets and predictable planting seasons just like we did. 

Even radical, chaos-gargling anarchists like the International Energy Agency and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney have agreed that the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avoid devastating climate change.

So maybe angry protestors aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of anger of everyone else. Maybe the expression we should be worried about isn’t an angry face, it’s a shrug.

Follow Scott on Twitter: @mescottvrooman

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