On January 23rd, Governor General Michaëlle Jean, Canada’s head of state, walked up to the Downtown Eastside Woman’s Centre on Columbia Street at Powell Street after police forcefully moved away a crowd protesting Mayor Sam Sullivan and his NPA-dominated Council. Women from the center had been treating the crowd to drumming like nobody else does drumming and sang the First Nations Mother Song which has become like an anthem for community uprising. A sign hung on the door to the center saying “Sam Sullivan: You Are Not Welcome Here!” But Sullivan had instead sent Councillor Elizabeth Ball after the Woman’s Centre manager Cynthia Low said “He’s never visited and now he wants to come with the Governor General. It’s irritating to some of our members,” members that include forty women who barricaded themselves in the shelter in the winter of 2006 when the City threatened to shut it down. Ball was not allowed into the centre either, but Jean and her husband were, where they spoke with a crowd of women behind closed doors for over two hours.

Aboriginal elder Carol Martin gave Jean a letter for the Queen demanding the identities and grave sites of children who died in residential schools set up under the authority of the Queen. Jean said she would deliver the letter. Bernie Williams gave Jean pictures of 59 people sleeping on Hastings Street. Jean said she would present the photos in the upcoming meeting of “Big City Mayors.” Gladys Radek shared her story of how she and her grandchildren survive on $15,000 per year, and later described Jean as “very compassionate. She was touched. I was sitting beside her. She reached over and said ‘oh wow.’ She held my hand. She felt the words I was saying to her.”

Another woman told CBC “She didn’t look down on anybody. She hugged the women, shook their hands, joked with them. She was real.” Another woman described it as “a very somber meeting, taken very seriously by the women and also by her Excellency.” Jean described the visit as “very moving.” She shared her own experiences as a refugee and talked of her work creating shelters for battered women and other emergency shelters in Quebec between 1979 and 1987.

After Jean left the centre, the protest followed her and Councillor Ball up the street chanting, “Walk past the closed-down hotels!” and “These are hotels you helped close, Ms Ball.” At one point Jean seemed to try to stop and wanted to talk with the protesters, saying “It’s not possible to walk like this,” surrounded by CSIS bodyguards, and said “This is a circus”—perhaps in reference to the anti-Olympics documentary “Five Ring Circus”!

Protesters followed for three blocks to the Dr Sun Yat Sen Garden where Sullivan was waiting in hiding. Protesters yelled across from the public access side of the pond at the Mayor. Jean reportedly mouthed the words “I know” to the protesters. Said DERA CEO Kim Kerr, “I don’t doubt she cares, but she can show she cares by insisting she be allowed to walk down Hastings.”

Rideau Hall had instructed the City not to clean up the neighbourhood for the visit. “She’s not doing tourism here,” said a spokeswoman, “Her Excellency is really set on seeing things as they are. There is no point in going if she is not going to see what it is like every day.” In 2004, Jean’s predecessor, Adrienne Clarkson, was criticized for having seen a sanitized DTES. Larry Campbell later admitted the streets had been hosed down in preparation for the visit. Ball said that Jean empathized with the women in the shelter and that she was more concerned with her experience in the shelter than by the protesters. Jean told CTV she understood the frustration felt by the demonstrators: “When you think that there are more than a million people who are homeless in Canada, of course that is unacceptable. . . and meeting some of these people in Vancouver was a moment that provoked a lot of thought in my mind.” At a press conference, while BC Premier Gordon Campbell looked on uncomfortably, Jean said “You know, the heckling is probably a manifestation of anger, of frustration. I can understand that.”

The next day, Jean was at the Centre A Gallery on Hastings Street for a forum on art and the disenfranchised. Demonstrators gathered outside. Jean said to the crowd inside, “I don’t mind [the protesters], it’s OK,” and she proceeded to give her talk and share with the crowd what she had learned at the Women’s Centre, about resilience in the face of adversity. One youth told of how police brutality was one of the biggest obstacles he faces. Police Chief Jim Chu, in attendance, called such incidents rare. That’s when flashing red and blue lights filled the forum and everyone turned to look out the window as six VPD officers piled on a man in the middle of the street, everyone except Jean’s husband, who was trying to focus on the moderator, who was saying “these are some of the issues we’re facing. . . Her Excellency and husband are here, and they’re witnessing what’s going on outside, but they’d also like to hear what you have to say.”

“Does anything speak louder than this, though?” yelled out a young man. A young woman returned from outside to announce that they were using a taser on the man. News crews ran outside, four cruisers and a paddy wagon blocked the street, and Jim Chu walked out and stood with the crowd of officers that had grown to over twelve uniformed and several plainclothes officers. The man was picked up and brought behind the paddy wagon where he was further brutalized and yelled out “I’ve got nowhere to live. I feel the cold. I feel the pain inside. I’ve had enough. Cut it off. Fuck you, dad. While I’m awake, not while I’m sleeping, Dad. You’re so fucking greedy, Dad. I don’t want to join the army!” followed by a pained wail as they pushed him violently into the paddy wagon while other officers blocked the cameras.

Chief Jim Chu returned to the forum and addressed the crowd: “People here instantly looked out the window and said ‘police brutality.’ There is a system where you investigate incidents. There is a system called courts, right? And courts have to be independent. And so many people jumped right to the conclusion that the police for no reason went out and used excessive force. And that’s not what we’re about. Why would officers do that? You know, there are times, very, very small times, when maybe an officer in the heat of the moment perhaps loses their temper, okay, that could happen.” Hours after the incident, it was announced that Jean would be cutting her visit short.

The police, media and politicians all contradict themselves regarding Jean’s visit. Sam Sullivan said of the protesters “That people like that would treat a woman like her the way they did is a disgrace to the city.” Gordon Campbell called the protests “upsetting. It’s a shame when things like that happen.” And Councillor Kim Capri said she was “personally very troubled by the reception that the governor general received.” The protests were presented in the media as having been directed at Jean, despite Canadian Press’ Steve Mertl having conceded that the protesters were “admittedly from a fringe group that wasn’t aiming primarily at [Jean].” This wasn’t enough to stop every major news outlet other than CBC from claiming that the protesters deeply hurt and offended Jean, and insinuating it was the protesters that had caused Jean to cut short her visit. Pivot lawyer David Eby worked to set the record straight on his blog, mentioning an email calling for a protest of Sullivan’s visit to the DTES, an email that did not mention the Governor General. “BC may as well be another country as far as Emerson and the Tories are concerned,” summed up Eby. “Help us Michaëlle!”

The taser incident is also marred by deception. VPD Sergeant Steve Watters told CBC that the man was almost hit by a bus and when approached by officers put up his hands like he was going to fight. He hit a female officer several times, said Watters, breaking her glasses and cutting her face, at which point a police officer deployed a taser in accordance with proper guidelines to tase.

VPD spokesperson Tim Fanning, however, claimed that the officers were unable to subdue the man and two transit cops that happened to be passing stepped in to deploy the taser. A witness, however, told CBC that the man had been in an argument on the sidewalk and had stepped out onto the street. “The cops hit him first. . . he was walking backwards and that’s when the cops started hitting him in the legs with a billy club. The man hit a female officer and then the other officers started hitting him.” The man was presented as a substance abuse victim well known to the police: 35-year-old Leonard Ablog Dyco, of no fixed address, charged with assaulting an officer.

Todd Bathis’ coverage on CTV used a clip of Jean saying of the protesters “I don’t mind that, it’s OK,” edited to imply that she was speaking instead of the police brutality. Fanning was reported by Canwest’s Linda Nguyen in the January 26th edition of the Vancouver Sun as having stressed that the man was not a protester, but an article in the National Post of the same day, by the same author, was presented under the headline, “Police Scuffle with Jean Event Protester.”

Columnists have also weighed in, such as Gary Mason’s January 26th Globe and Mail column in which he blames Jean for the circus and belittles her experience in the women’s shelter. These columns have several effects: they serve to further entrench the lies about Jean’s visit, they expose the journalists’ total ignorance of the issues and the community, and they reveal a deep fear of what Jean learned from her visit. After all, this is a woman who spoke to the Alberta Legislature, urging MLAs to use Alberta’s collective wealth to ensure that nobody was left behind, and that all Albertans were guaranteed a voice.

Oh, Madame Jean! Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky. Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question. . . Oh do not ask “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

They are wiping out the poor, but it is still not too late to get lost in Vancouver. Let us feed the pigeons at City Hall, with rightful mayors like Betty Krawczyk or Victoria’s Ben Isitt, and urge them to do their duty in the mayor’s office. Let us see the sisters in the street, the lonely old people in the windows, with all thy tears command. Let us arise and go now under the city to see the city dumps for what they are.

Just respond, Madame Jean, care of this newspaper. I promise East Van will give you the tour you deserve, like a philosopher queen walking amongst the ranks of infinitely beautiful, infinitely suffering neighbourhoods as they end not with bangs but with whimpers.