23 Jan Updated: Estimated 27,000+ Canadians rally for democracy
A vibrant and energetic crowd filled Parliament Hill today where Shawn caught up with the CBC’s Kady O’Malley to get her take on the protest and what it’s like live-blogging these types of events.
O’Malley on the prorogation protest from Shawn Dearn on Vimeo.
It’s been a busy day. When I wasn’t freezing and tweeting at the Ottawa protest, I was tracking the crowd-counts from across Canada. With 32 communities that I could find tweeted reports on; I estimate that over 25,000 people rallied against the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue parliament. I’ve uploaded and embedded below a PDF with the community totals and my methodology. I’m hoping to continue to add to the list, please comment if you have numbers from cities not listed (or if you have a correction.) Update: as of Sunday at 8:00 am I have added 7 more communities; including New York City and St. Johns. I’m still looking for smaller communities to report. About twenty listed events could push it to over 30,000. Again, please comment with corrections or more information.
Estimated Crowd Attendance for #CAPP Rallies
To provide a visual look at today’s Ottawa protest, this is Gregory Pang’s shots of the demonstration today from Flickr.
And lastly, a quick look at the instant popularity of the #noprorogue hash tag on Twitter.
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My call: the anti-prorogue rallies are a success.. « Scott's DiaTribes (January 23rd, 2010 at 6:43pm)
[...] 2 @ 6:40 pm: Ian Capstick with an early list of estimated crowd attendance at various CAPP rallies (right now he’s [...]
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Anti-prorogation rally: the left has a party and social media gets the win | Joseph Lavoie (January 23rd, 2010 at 6:58pm)
[...] Ian Capstick reports that with 12 32 cities reporting, estimates are at 18,500 25,000 protesters across [...]
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From Facebook to filling the streets « News Worthy (January 23rd, 2010 at 9:24pm)
[...] Hortons coffee, braved the cold and told Prime Minister Stephen Harper to “get back to work.” Twenty-five thousand. Using what I heard from the protesters, reporters and bloggers on Twitter, that’s my estimate of [...]
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Stageleft: life on the left side » It Sounds Like It Was A Pretty Good Day (January 23rd, 2010 at 9:30pm)
[...] Hortons coffee, braved the cold and told Prime Minister Stephen Harper to “get back to work.” Twenty-five thousand. Using what I heard from the protesters, reporters and bloggers on Twitter, that’s my estimate of [...]
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Prorogue, Activism and the Power Personal Networks (January 25th, 2010 at 12:10pm)
[...] has unleashed a whirl of protest in response to his decision to prorogue parliament. Some 27,000 people across Canada rallied in communities large and small, their activities and personal [...]
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Pull My Strings (January 27th, 2010 at 7:26pm)
[...] of pointing out the significance of the group and the rallies. According to Ian Capstick’s blog, about 27,000 people attended the CAPP rallies overall which sounds fairly accurate based on the [...]
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Joeflash’s Enigmacopaedia » Why Flash is Not on The iPad (January 30th, 2010 at 4:24am)
[...] into the torture of Afghan detainees , triggering a Facebook group 220,000 users strong, leading to nationwide protests last weekend, surprising every political pundit who had written off the internet as a viable vehicle for change [...]
Some brave soul in Winnipeg did a count at the rally as the march went by. He came up with 438. Seems about right to me.
Reporting roughly 600 at Rally in Guelph, Ontario.
Kudos. This is great work!
Just a note, but Kingston rally definitely had more than 150 attending. Media reported 500, and I counted more than 400 myself…
London Free Press reports 500 in London, with video.
You’re missing Windsor. The Windsor Star reports a turnout of “about 200″. http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Windsor+protest+prorogue+Parliament/2477789/story.html
Huge thanks to all for the updates. Keep them coming!
Followed the Tweets as I couldn’t attend – expect that was not uncommon – many more wanted to be there but couldn’t.
Nice bit of reporting on an exceptional day for Canadian democracy.
Also liked the cuts in your video.
Great bit of reporting on new media implications in the Globe. The Toronto protest was a blast. Unfortunately, they (the Globe) is still reporting “more than 3,000″ at the Toronto rally. More than? I’ll say.
It would be interesting to develop a formula to estimate rally turnout based on the number of signs. Clearly not all attendees carry signs and they would be easier to count in photos etc.
Yor numbers are exaggerated. RCMP in Ottawa said 3500. Police in Toronto said 5-7K. Vancouver, 1000. Waterloo, 500. Hamilton, 350. Montreal, 300. I could go on. Please do some research and check the papers to get the REAL numbers. Using estimates from partisans in attendance will only net you an inaccurate result.
From this article in the Globe And Mail
“A crowd of about 100 stood outside the legislature in Halifax”
“In Edmonton, about 250 people”
“In Montreal, hundreds also stood in a downtown public square”
It is safe to assume that numbers are worse in other cities in Canada or they would report them.
To think if anything these figures are inflated, what a dismal turnout for this big rally promoted by the partisan pundits in the media.
Since the CBC took this demonstration on as a personal crusade with incessant publicity for the last few weeks, and yesterday running on screen messages inviting people to attend the prorogation demonstrations in their communities, must just demonstrate once again, that obviously nobody watches the CBC, and we should maybe begin a Face Book protest, that Canadian taxpayers are wasting a billion dollars a year subsidizing this broadcasting abortion. One thing you can be sure, after what Canadians saw on TV and read, these same pundits will not be able to convince Canadians this was a huge success and demonstration – it was a dismal flop. Three party leaders Ignatieff. Layton and May, at the rally in Ottawa as headliners and entertainment couldn’t hold a thousand people there for the duration of the rally. Ignatieff will now have to go back to the drawing board, and follow through with his earlier promise in January “to investigate the conduct of our troops on the ground” in Afghanistan, who they have accused of being complicit in committing war crimes in Afghanistan because “they detained and handed over for torture a lot of innocent people”. What is more, all Ignatieff and the Liberals have found, to this point in time for substantiation of their accusations of abuse, is some Taliban detainee being hit with a shoe, but their slurs and condemnations of our military continue.
To end on something light, the CBC are reporting, would you believe, that in Calgary “a group of protesters gathered outside the prime minister’s constituency office” ( it was never clarified but it was reported that these were people actually waiting for a bus and not prorogation protesters) and the CBC didn’t mention, that in vast majority of the cities across Canada, nobody but nobody showed up.
Oh Yeah there were ‘protests also slated for London, England, and several U.S. cities.” and how did that turn out after the lefty organizers told us this prorogation protest was sweeping internationally ( don’t wait for the partisan political pundits to tell you after they have hyped this fiasco for weeks) – results are below and now can we hear the lefties spin this as a huge success – actually it is a farce when analyzed – is this the best the combined efforts of the opposition parties can come up with.
“About 20 protesters, most expatriate Canadians now living in Britain, gathered across the street from Canada House – home of the Canadian High Commission in London – holding makeshift placards”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/bureau-blog/london-prorogation-protest-skips-buckingham-heads-for-pub/article1442093/?cid=art-rail-blogolitics
Whitehorse rally attendance was around 200.
Any word on how many turned out for Grande Prairie, AB?
Your figures about the number of protestors are grossly exaggerated. There were 250 in Halifax, where I live not 750, and 7000 in Toronto.