A very impressive number of people attended the anti-prorogation rallies across Canada yesterday. While media sources say "thousands" attended such rallies, the cross-country number is about an order of magnitude higher... given that the rallies in just Toronto and Ottawa push the number to over 10000 (CTV Toronto reports "over 7000" in Toronto, while media sources vary from 3000 to 4000 for the Ottawa rallies).
An estimate (primarily using twitter) places the attendance to be about 27090 people from 40 communities across the country (and this still excludes some communities, as No Prorogue! lists 66 communities with rallies).
While exact numbers will surely be a point of contention between those who are opposed to prorogation and those who support Harper's action, one cannot deny that this issue has angered enough Canadians to enable such considerable protests to spring up.
Some people will also note the discrepancy between the size of the Facebook group (over 200000 members of the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament group) and the size of the protests, but it takes real commitment for tens of thousands of people to show up at the protests (often in cold winter conditions for hours).
Peace and long life.
EDIT: The original link to the 27090 number is now broken, so here is another link.
1 year ago
The first reports I read had numbers at 3,000. I was there and knew that to be impossible. I found this video which shows thousands more participants than that.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhqdoTO_T3Y
Thanks for the link! That was an awesome video!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how the media estimates crowd sizes, leading to an initial number of 3000 for Toronto. The police estimated over 7000 and passed that along to at least CTV...
Over a thousand people could fit into a senior high school gym. The area occupied by the Toronto rally easily dwarfed such a gym...