Wait, there’s something missing here!
One of the more controversial incidents on Burnaby Mountain happened when two parents claimed that their children made a conscious decision to cross police lines and break the court’s injunction. Some observers felt this was a good step towards teaching the children about the value of civil disobedience, others looked at the incident with disgust wondering “how can responsible parents allow this to happen?”. BC Premier Christy Clark spoke out today and shared her opinion saying “it’s not OK”.
As expected, Clark’s statement caused a lot of uproar. Also as expected, the many in the media came out with guns drawn, criticising the premier for her statements. But the media simply made this judgement based on opinion- without analysing the facts…
The video and pictures that have accompanied the media’s stories show 11 year old Kate Fink-Jensen and her mother, and completely ignored the behaviour of the crowd. The image they give is of a sensible mother and daughter telling the story after it happened. But it doesn’t appear that anyone in the media has picked-up the video of when the incident happened- I’ve posted it above for you, please have a quick listen.
When courts are asked to intervene in situations where children want to make controversial decisions about their lives (e.g. in medical care), one of the main tests they use is to try and determine if they are cognizant about the choices they’re making. Following that principle, let’s listen to what the two girls announced when they made “their own” choices.
Kate Fink-Jensen made the first statement:
“Ahm, I’m 11 years old, and I’m going to cross the police line because I hate what’s being done over there to the mountain. And every time that drill goes down, that’s one part of my great future that’s being taken away from me”
The drilling into the mountain was for a test. It was relatively unintrusive, and left no lasting environmental impact on the mountain. There’s no way the drilling test could have an impact on Kate’s future- her statement that it would was completely uninformed. So, based on what Kate said, it doesn’t appear that she was cognizant of her decision.
Now, let’s listen to Naomi Cech, the other 11 year-old girl who made “her decision” to cross the line:
“I’m 11, and Kinder Morgan is wrong, what they’re doing is wrong. They can’t just go around drilling holes into mountains just because they want oil and money- it’s wrong!”
So, the first problem is that Kinder Morgan isn’t just going “around drilling holes into mountains”- they first applied for permission from the regulators. Next, while there’s no question that money is KM’s key motivator, they aren’t drilling for oil- the company doesn’t drill for oil anywhere, they build pipelines.
It’s understandable that people would want to teach their kids the value of protesting about things they believe in. That said, it appears that the parents were teaching the wrong lesson here- the prerequisite to subjecting oneself to arrest is to have a thorough understanding why you’re doing it. In this case, neither kid demonstrated they did. Most of the criticism has been directed to the parents- equally, it should have been towards the crowd who egged them on.
And as for Christy Clark? Many people have been criticising her own parenting skills after a story came out in April 2013- Clark’s son Hamish encouraged her to run a red light on their way to hockey practice and she complied. Fair is fair, this wasn’t a stellar example of good parenting either. But, what sort of parent brings their kids to a place where stuff like this is happening?
Kinder Morgan Injunction Enforcement | 20•Nov•2014 from Ramshackle Pictures on Vimeo.
