APEC and the University:
An Open Letter to Dr. Martha Piper

[President, University of British Columbia]

by Adam Jones

22 January 1998

Dear Dr. Piper,

Together with many who heard you speak at the APEC forum on January 20 (see The Vancouver Sun, January 21), I would like to thank you for the respect you showed the UBC community by convening the forum and facing some very probing questioning from those present. It is not the sort of behaviour we are used to from the more autocratic and aloof individuals who have occupied the president's office in the past.

Like many in attendance on January 20, though, I remain perplexed by the university's actions prior to and during the APEC conference, and by the explanations you have offered for those actions. You should be commended for arranging the speedy release of around a thousand pages of essential documents, which have given us a much clearer picture of the communications between your office and the Prime Minister's Office leading up to the conference. But the documents raise many more questions than you have satisfactorily answered.

In the exchange that followed the round-table, I asked you directly about the university's involvement in two specific actions. On both occasions, your office appears to have caved in to political demands by an illegitimate outside authority. One was the November 22 decision by the Prime Minister's Office to extend the security perimeter around the Museum of Anthropology two days ahead of schedule. This enabled the federal government to occupy the grounds of the museum, and the RCMP to evict and arrest a number of peaceful protesters who had erected a "tent city" on the lawn. The reason you gave at the January 20 forum for going along with the decision was that the demonstrators posed a potential threat to the treasures inside the museum.

Come now, Dr. Piper. The protesters had been supremely peaceful throughout, to the point of using washable paint for their slogans and collecting their cigarette butts in plastic Baggies. Why were they suddenly transformed into a threat to the museum's holdings? Why did museum staff themselves express no such concerns?

There are indications that the Prime Minister's Office threatened to expropriate the museum grounds unilaterally if you did not agree to extend the perimeter ahead of schedule. But you were under no obligation to bend to this or any other pressure from an authority that had no legitimate say in security arrangements for the conference (these were, and always are, the purview of the RCMP). Rather, I believe you had a positive obligation to stand up to such pressure, and if necessary to publicly denounce it.

The second decision involved the substantial reduction of the area designated as a "protest zone" on the day of the conference, November 25. Again knuckling under to pressure from the Prime Minister's Office, you agreed to redraw a line the university had negotiated with the RCMP. The new boundary reduced the designated protest space to a tiny patch by the Law building, where the protesters would be all but invisible to the leaders in their passing limousines. The added congestion, and the frustration of protesters at being denied any meaningful opportunity to protest, very likely contributed to the well-known fence-pulling and pepper-spray incidents that followed. Indeed, you yourself contemplated this possibility during the negotiations with the Prime Minister's Office. You wrote to the PMO on November 19 expressing concern about the decision "to reduce significantly the area available for line of sight access to the APEC leaders," claiming it "increase[d] the risk of a serious incident arising out of ... frustration."

At the January 20 forum, you stated that you eventually reached a compromise with the PMO that balanced their "security" considerations against your own desire to provide space for protesters. But this begs far more pressing questions, Dr. Piper. What security concerns could have persuaded you to change the boundary even by a centimetre, when (to quote from your November 19 letter) "the boundaries previously agreed ... by the RCMP would in no way endanger the safety of the APEC leaders"? And why did you apparently collude with the PMO in reducing the visible protest area so dramatically, when it could only make a mockery of your claim that UBC was serving as a forum for free and open debate about APEC?

Perhaps, at your earliest convenience, you would favour us with a detailed response to these questions, and to a number of others left hanging after your January 20 appearance:

Why have you not once publicly condemned the widespread, systematic abuses by RCMP officers on our campus last November? Why have you not denounced even actions that the RCMP has disowned - such as releasing UBC students from jail only after they signed an outrageous document surrendering their constitutional rights indefinitely? Why did you not speak out publicly about the arrest of a UBC law student, my brother Craig, who was tackled to the ground by three police officers and jailed for 14 hours for holding a sign reading "Free Speech"? Or the arrest of Jaggi Singh, a former UBC student strolling alone, who was snatched up outside the Student Union Building by plainclothes police in unmarked cars - a tactic reminiscent of Latin American military regimes? Perhaps most egregiously, why have you not expressed shock and concern over reports that every female UBC student jailed by police on November 25 was strip-searched, in some cases cavity-searched, while not one male detainee apparently received such treatment?

These are actions for which I believe you and the university can be held accountable, but which you did not initiate. On occasion, however, university officials or employees appear to have played a vanguard role. For example:

Last October 31, three students were charged with criminal mischief for writing anti-APEC slogans (in erasable, water-soluble "glass chalk") on the Atrium of Norman Mackenzie House. The university apparently requested their arrest. Surely, Dr. Piper, similar activities have been a staple at UBC since time immemorial - the delinquency of certain Engineers comes to mind. Even when students are not courteous enough to use erasable chalk, the RCMP is very rarely called in. Why, only when there was an added element of political speech, did the university crack down?

As well, what role did your office and/or other university officials play in the seizure of a Tibetan flag from the Graduate Student Centre prior to APEC? Among the documents released recently is an e-mail from a university employee, notifying your office that she had asked Campus Security to remove the flag after protests by a couple of anti-Tibetan activists. Why did you not act immediately to overturn that instruction? If it was not brought to your attention at the time, why did you not at least condemn it post facto?

In closing, Dr. Piper, although I am glad you convened and appeared at the January 20 forum, I feel you have yet to fully grasp the scale and character of the abuses that were committed on our campus last November. Your accounting of the university's involvement in the fiasco is far from complete. And you have done nothing to indicate how you will ensure that such disgraceful police actions and outside political interventions are never again permitted at UBC.

I believe there is much you could contribute to a discussion of the APEC events and their implications. But your first contribution, in my view, should be a more specific engagement with the questions and concerns that are still outstanding. It is time for you to address the deep misgivings many of us have about your leadership during these brief but critical moments in the life of our community.

Sincerely,

Adam Jones, Ph.D. Student
Department of Political Science