Federal Green party Leader Elizabeth May, centre, is arrested by RCMP officers after joining protesters outside Kinder Morgan’s facility in Burnaby on Friday March 23, 2018. DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

As history shows, protest is often the spear point of beneficial social reform, even when “laws” are broken in the process.

Elizabeth May has quite the resume: it now includes getting arrested.

The Green Party leader was protesting Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion when she and Kennedy Stewart, the NDP MP for Burnaby South, were arrested at the gate of one of the company’s work sites Friday. So far, 100 protesters have been charged along with them, including the co-founder of Greenpeace.

The charge that the two politicians face is civil contempt for blockading a road. It’s not a criminal charge and the politicians are free to continue their protest of the pipeline project.

For now Kinder Morgan’s work has stopped to accommodate a bird migration, but you can bet the farm that both politicians and thousands of others will return to their civil disobedience when work resumes. And yes, they’ll probably get charged again. It is going to be a long, hot summer on Burnaby Mountain.

Some of the response to May’s arrest has been as cringeworthy as it was predictable. To more than a few Twitter idiots, May is just a shit-disturbing politician, someone who knew full well as a lawyer that she was breaking the law when she violated the terms of a court injunction. In other words, she got what she deserved.

In fact, neither May, Stewart nor any of the thousands of protesters who have already made the trip to Burnaby Mountain would have been there in the first place if Justin Trudeau had simply kept his word.

Campaigning in 2015, the Liberal leader said that Harper-era environmental assessments were badly flawed because they were skewed towards industry players. That was a polite way of saying that the National Energy Board had been hijacked by the oil patch under Stephen Harper.

Trudeau promised that all of these projects, including pipelines, would return to square one. Each project would have to pass a sound environmental assessment process, and only then would his government grant approvals.

It sounded good, but like electoral reform and government transparency, it didn’t happen. Accordingly, May has called out the government’s permit for Trans Mountain as “erroneous” and therefore illegitimate.

The boo-birds who have attacked May for her “illegal” protest, also like to paint her as zealot-in-chief of the anti-development, tree-hugging set. It is true May loves trees. She proved that 40 years ago as a 20-something protester in her epic fight against Big Pulp and Paper during Nova Scotia’s bitter spruce budworm wars.

But May isn’t in favour of throwing herself in front of every bulldozer. The proof? The Green Party leader does not argue that the tar sands should be shut down. In fact, she endorses the position taken by Unifor, the major union for tar sands workers, that Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion is a job and profit-sucker, as well as a threat to the environment.

Instead of sending diluted bitumen south, where the U.S. makes all the value-added profit, May says that solid bitumen should be processed or refined in Alberta for the Canadian market.

That way the country is not shipping out jobs.

That way a dubious pipeline filled with a toxic substance doesn’t have to cross 800 different waterways in Alberta and B.C. before it reaches Burnaby.

And that way British Columbians don’t have to worry as much about what would happen in the Salish Sea if there were to be a major spill from an oil tanker carrying “dilbit” to foreign markets. That threat becomes seven times greater if the Trans Mountain project proceeds, as the prime minister vows it will.

There is a deeper issue at play in the Kinder Morgan protest than the pipeline expansion per se, or the arrests it has triggered. During the Harper era, there was an out-and-out assault on public protests of any kind. The former prime minister liked his citizens either onside or docile.

If anyone doubts that, it pays to remember how the Toronto police under the supervision of the RCMP, manhandled protesters and passersby alike at the G20 Summit in Toronto in 2010. Hundreds of innocent people were “kettled” by police and held for hours in a downpour. More than 1,000 were arrested and confined in a wretched detention centre.

It pays to recall Harper ordered that all protests, even peaceful ones, had to be videotaped by police.

It pays to think about the fact that a Harper-era cabinet minister, Vic Toews, referred to protesters as “eco-extremists,” who were so menacing they were covered in the government’s new anti-terror legislation.

And what exactly was an eco-terrorist? As Gerald Caplan wrote back in 2013, anyone who believed in global warming.

That included NGOs, who were put under the microscope by Harper and the Canada Revenue Agency on the trumped up premise that their “insurrectionist” activities were being financed by foreign powers.

The real story? Canada was on the superhighway to becoming a police state under Harper, who loathed protesters as anti-capitalists and enemies of strong-arm government.

He never saw what they saw, the beautiful, blue, and fragile planet that needed protecting in an age of unprecedented human greed and exploitation. Fouled water, whales without calves, polluted air and Mother Earth running a fever.

Harper was dead wrong on protesters, and to a degree, so too is Trudeau. As history shows, protest is often the spear point of beneficial social reform, even when “laws” are broken in the process.

The Suffragettes were demonized as anarchists and terrorists in their day, and imprisoned and force-fed for their insistence on gender equality. They won the vote for women in 1928.

Bigots sicced dogs and turned firehoses on civil rights marchers in the 1960s. But Martin Luther King, who was arrested for his crusade for racial equality, ultimately broke down discriminatory state laws and ushered in the acceptance of blacks as full citizens of the United States.

Nelson Mandela broke laws in South Africa and spent 27 years in jail. But he ultimately led a movement that dismantled the country’s apartheid government and became the first black president in that nation’s history.

From Magna Carta to Martin Luther, from the Boston Tea Party to the French Revolution, individual rights and freedoms have advanced on the shoulders of a few souls brave enough to stand up to arbitrary measures that reduced their fellows to serfdom. And yes, they sometimes broke the law to do it. Elizabeth May, Canada’s Joan of Arc of the environment, is in that tradition.

Go girl, go.

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