VANCOUVER—British Columbia’s former solicitor-general was among the hundreds of social media users who suggested police “cut the cables” of seven protesters who suspended themselves from Vancouver’s Ironworkers Memorial Bridge earlier this week to protest oil tankers.

John Les, who served as the Minister of Public Safety in charge of policing under the previous B.C. Liberal government — and Chilliwack’s MLA until 2013 — wrote a Facebook comment Thursday in response to a CBC News video captioned “These pipeline opponents dangled from a Vancouver bridge to disrupt oil tanker traffic. Until police took action.”

“Next time, just cut the cables,” Les, also former mayor of Chilliwack, wrote from his Facebook account at 6:35 a.m. Thursday.

The bridge span, from which the Greenpeace protesters dangled by industrial climbing ropes for roughly 36 hours, is 43 metres above sea level, according to National Energy Board documents; an average adult falling from that height would hit the water at an estimated 105 kilometres per hour.

Attempts to reach Les — who is the taxpayer-salaried chair of the government’s B.C. Farm Industry Review Board, to which he was appointed in 2013 — were unsuccessful.

“John can speak for himself,” said B.C. Liberal MLA Peter Milobar in a phone interview from his Kamloops riding Thursday. “In terms of our caucus, we’re confident the legal system will do its thing when people protest in ways deemed to be illegal.

“If they’re breaking laws, like most citizens we’d expect both the police and courts to deal with people.”

The protesters face mischief charges and were released on a promise to appear in court. They could also be charged with blocking shipping traffic, which carries penalties of jail time and up to $1 million fines.

Les was far from alone in such a response to the dangling demonstrators who blocked a departing oil tanker and a number of unrelated vessels from using the busy Burrard Inlet shipping route for two business days.

Reaction to the protest on Twitter included hundreds of users documented by StarMetro posting similar remarks including, “Cut the ropes, seven less just like that,” and “The fastest way down would be to cut the nylon ropes on the bridge. We could feed the fishes that way, making those idiots a little useful after all.”

Less common were several Twitter users who remarked, “Shoot them down,” “Send a tanker down and see how many they can knock off the ropes. Sort of a human piñata,” or joked about using the suspended activists for “target practice.”

Former B.C. Conservative Party candidate and blogger Alan Forseth — who served as the provincial party’s regional director for Kamloops, Thompson, Nicola and Fraser region — wrote on Twitter: “Damn shame they couldn’t have just cut the ropes of these moron protesters, and just let them fall in the river.”

Asked about his remark, Forseth said in an email that while the tone might have been “a little strong,” the frustration it expressed is widely shared by British Columbians who feel environmentalists want to sabotage B.C.’s resource sector.

“I do not believe most people would take that comment seriously,” Forseth said. “Instead it should show the frustration that a very large — and I would personally say a majority — of people in B.C. feel about eco- enviro-radicals who time and time again hold the province’s resource and development industry hostage.

“…I am proud to have worked in the resource industry … and so are the tens of thousands of Interior and northern residents. Maybe it’s time some one stood up for them?”

Milobar called “cut the ropes” comments “over-the-top” but said vitriol can come from both sides of the debate over the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion, which he said would provide significant benefits to his constituents and to local First Nations its construction would employ.

“There’s a limit to all the discussion, but you certainly see over-the-top comments from people both for or against the pipeline,” he said. “I don’t think such comments are exclusive to people in support of the pipeline.

“I think it speaks volumes to how the province has dropped the ball on this; the premier and Minister of Environment haven’t exactly been strong in condemning the acts (of protesters) … That’s to be expected when you have a government that comes from a protest background.”

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On Wednesday, Premier John Horgan — whose government has said it would use every legal tool available to stop the pipeline expansion and is involved in several court cases against it — criticized the “obstruction” the protesters had caused.

“Protesters, as long as they’re abiding by the law, that’s their right in a free society,” he told reporters. “When they start to impinge on other people and infringe on the law of the land … that’s a problem.”

But the at-times violent social media vitriol that surfaced around the pipeline protest bears echoes of the threatening tone of online remarks directed at Alberta Premier Rachel Notley since her election, several of which have led to police investigations.

Some people downplay violent language or jokes when they occur online, even though most people would characterize such remarks as “uncivil,” according to research by Simon Fraser University professors Chantal Faucher, Margaret Jackson, and Wanda Cassidy, published in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education.

But even when such social media comments are justified as just jokes, they have the potential to “escalate” offline — and have a toxic effect on those targeted.

“Incivility … can be a passive form of aggression, somewhat ambiguous as to intent to harm,” the authors wrote in their 2015 study. “The perpetrator who is called out for his or her behaviour may easily deflect the accusation by suggesting that it was just a joke.

“However, incivility can also escalate into overt forms of aggression where the intent is quite clear.”

And the federal Ministry of Public Safety’s website on cyber-bullying says, “Anonymity, greater social dissemination, lack of supervision present on electronic media, and greater accessibility to the target are characteristics that set cyberbullying apart from offline bullying.”

For the B.C. Liberals’ Milobar, the “overblown” calls to “cut the ropes” shouldn’t distract from the issues at play in the pipeline debate — such as economic development or the right to protest.

“Some of that gets overblown on social media,” he said. “It speaks to maybe some frustrations people have with what seem to be never-ending delays … We have (law) enforcement agencies and a court system that works quite well, that’s the appropriate way to handle protesters.

“It’s fine if people want to protest, but there’s lots of legal avenues for them to have protest areas — they shouldn’t be putting the travelling public or responders at peril.”

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