“Why does nobody show up to our rallies?”

I was looking forward to a rally today at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. It looked good on paper: it was sponsored by the Disability Action Page of Canada, which promotes the very popular platform to “end legislated poverty of disabled Canadians”, and even had Sonia Furstenau, Leader of the BC Green Party and MLA of Cowichan Valley for guest speaker. It could have been a success on this basis; many rallies build on far less.

That being said, I was bracing myself for the worst, for multiple reasons, not least of them that no one attended their previous rally last spring. And indeed no one showed up today either. Zero attendance. Absolute flop. It really begs the question: what the hell happened?

Well, the organisers keep making rookie mistakes which ruin all of their efforts, and they keep wondering whether the weather was to blame. I can say it wasn’t the weather, but lack of planning which ruined everything. I just wrote an article on how to organise a protest, and this one raised a few of its red flags from the onset.

The worst problem was the date and time. It was set on a Friday at noon, which is about the worst time of the week for a protest. It would have been far wiser to make it a Saturday at least. If one must pick a work week, it better be any but Friday, and it would then have been better to avoid office hours; a Wednesday at 5PM would have worked better (at least during the summer). I met a disabled person two days ago who would have loved to attend, if only it hadn’t been taking place on a Friday at noon.

Another pertains to its online promotion⁠—or lack thereof. The organisers posted on their page, which has quite a few followers, but that was about it; I didn’t see it shared to any major group. They made an illustration with the acronym DERB (which you’d be forgiven for not knowing means “Disability Emergency Relief Benefit“) instead of writing the full name of the event and its time and location, which is the strict minimum I’d expect from a poster promoting an event. I was told they’d also made a Facebook Event, but I couldn’t find it, which means they must have messed up that part too.

In short, very few people from Victoria must have heard of the event, and those rare few couldn’t attend due to the inconvenient timing. It definitely wasn’t the weather: I just covered a protest taking place under pouring rain and it was a relative success.

The organisers decided to hold a press conference on Wednesday instead, which I am planning to attend. Let’s hope they don’t mess up the press releases too, otherwise I’ll be the only one showing up again, and I hate to watch brave people with good causes make fools of themselves.