New York-based campaign against Jasper Park development has local face
Ricken Patel bristles when people label Avaaz, the New York-based group fighting a private development in Jasper National Park, as foreign.
Avaaz’s 35-year-old founder and executive director was born and raised in Edmonton, considers Jasper his “backyard” and has used the park for camping, skiing and hiking.
“I feel very, very Canadian,” Patel says from his Manhattan office. “There really is this wonderfully inspiring core of Canadians working internationally in human rights and humanitarian affairs. And I feel very much a part of my country when I’m doing this work.”
On Tuesday, Jasper National Park superintendent Greg Fenton is expected to announce whether Parks Canada will approve Brewster Travel Canada’s proposed Glacier Discovery Walk, a privately run interpretive walk onto a glass-floored observation deck extending 30 metres into the Sunwapta Valley.
On Monday, local protesters will present Fenton with a petition of more than 177,000 signatures denouncing the proposal as a “dangerous precedent” allowing the privatization of Canada’s national parks.
Since its 2007 inception, Avaaz, the group behind those signatures, has been a pebble in the shoe of governments and corporations worldwide. Patel boasts of having 12 million email addresses spanning 193 countries, a virtual Rolodex of people ready to take on media baron Rupert Murdoch or regimes in Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Syria.
About 650,000 of Avaaz’s subscribers are Canadians, who have contributed about $3 million in online donations.
Among the organization’s targets is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in particular his unwillingness to address climate change, Patel says. Avaaz has tried to undermine Harper’s campaigns during the last two federal elections. And he threatened to sue Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird after he called Avaaz a “shadowy foreign organization” bankrolled by foreign interests.
But before the cyber warfare, lawsuits, and editorial attacks, Patel was a skinny Edmonton boy practising kicks and chops in a south side gym. He says his British-born mother “was his greatest teacher” in helping him learn the fights worth having.
“She taught me there were only two emotions, love and fear,” Patel says. “Martial arts helps you to deal with and overcome fear. And that allows you to come from love.”
Michael Woodford, owner of Edmonton Mixed Martial Arts, remembers the shy 11-year-old who walked into his studio. He was impressed by Patel’s speed, athleticism and work ethic. “He was driven in everything he did,” Woodford says. “If he chose to, he certainly would have been a great competitor, a great fighter.”
Woodford can’t recall his student losing a match, but he remembers a 12-year-old Patel saying he wanted to work with the United Nations to further human rights.
Patel earned his black belt, and worked in Woodford’s studio as a part-time instructor while attending Archbishop Macdonald High School. Then he went to Queen’s University in Ontario, Oxford, and finally the Kennedy School at Harvard. His master’s thesis adviser was future Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, and Patel worked as a speechwriter for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
After stints in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan and Sudan, Patel moved to New York, where he still trains.
Each month, Avaaz begins another handful of campaigns. In 10 minutes, he can gauge the success of a petition by signatures, emails and donations.
As for the national park initiative, “It’s not the most viral petition we’ve ever seen, but it is a very strong response,” he says. “I think it speaks to the level of concern that Canadians have about our national parks.”
But Patel says the group is unlikely to resort to civil disobedience if the Brewster proposal is approved.
“As long as public voices are lis- tened to and respected, democracy is working,” Patel says. “People really, really want to make a difference. If you can produce a convincing argument for that in 100 words in an email, there is no limit to what people will do.”