Occupy Wall Street in Canada: Some ask where’s the anger, momentum?

The Occupy Wall Street protest is a month old and well-entrenched in New York and dozens of other U.S. cities.

But the Canadian spin-offs that hit major cities such as Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver last Saturday don't seem to have built the same anger-driven momentum. There are the same kinds of downtown encampments, only much smaller even less focused than their U.S. counterparts, it appears.

The Occupy venues have become magnets for all sorts of causes - environmental, social, aboriginal, anti-capitalist - that surface at regular demonstrations. The leaderless participants are holding "general assemblies" to try to work out a coherent message.

But there just doesn't seem to be the same wellspring of rage we've seen south of the border, a Canadian Press story observed.

Perhaps it's because the huge income gap between the richest one per cent of Americans and the other "99 per cent" is far less evident in Canada, Carleton University business professor Ian Lee said.

Canadian taxes, social programs and universal health care take the edge off, said Lee.

"We're certainly not perfect -- no country is -- but we are not doing badly," Lee said.

Statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development show that even before the country's tax and social programs are factored in, Canada has an average ratio of income distribution, much lower than the United States.

And while top Canadian business executives earn millions of dollars, their compensation pales in comparison to the huge pay and bonus packages of their U.S. colleagues.

Protest numbers in Toronto have dwindled since the weekend and Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente said even Saturday's initial effort drew fewer people than NDP leader Jack Layton's funeral or a protest the same day outside Toronto over a planned quarry on prime farm land. The support of major unions hasn't helped.

Like many observers, Wente pointed to unfocused nature of the event and the relative banality of the occupiers' demands.

" 'We need to adjust the monetary system to be a lot more respectful to the planet,' said one man I spoke with. 'We need kindness, not greed,' said someone else. And who could disagree with that?"

There were some thoughtful voices, Wente said, but she criticized the media for overdoing their coverage.

In an opinion piece in the Montreal Gazette, Michel Kelly-Gagnon, said the protesters have a legitimate beef about the way big financial institutions and corporations were bailed out after the 2008 crash.

But he said "the protesters' goals and messages would be different if they got a better understanding of how the economy works and what the facts are."

Kelly-Gagnon, president of the Montreal Economic Institute, also trotted out OECD figures to show Canada is close to norms for the organization when it comes to government spending. He also blamed ballooning U.S. public spending for some of America's problems.

And he challenged the coherency of the movement's message.

"Many of the protesters express inconsistent demands like, as David Suzuki noted, both opening frontiers and increasing protectionism," he said.