[LINK] "Topless woman removed from House of Commons after protesting anti-terror bill"

[rfmcdonald]

FEMEN, the international women's feminist group, is active in Canada. We learned this yesterday when, as described by the National Post's Jake Edmiston, a lone protester criticizing bill C-51 was thrown out of parliament.

A topless woman protesting the Conservative government’s anti-terror bill was ejected from the House of Commons on Monday during a discussion about honouring Vietnamese refugees.

The protester, Neda Topaloski with the Canadian wing of the international Femen movement, was in the sitting in public gallery, with two guards standing nearby on either side of her, she said. One of the security guards stepped out briefly, so seeing an opportunity, she took off her shirt. The officers gave chase and Ms. Topaloski ran about the gallery, screaming: “C-51 is war on freedom.”

[. . .]

As Ms. Topaloski was carried out, the in-house camera stayed fixed on the startled parliamentarians. So no footage of the incident surfaced Monday, making it largely a disappointment for Ms. Topaloski’s Femen — which thrives on photos of their trademark topless protests appearing in the media.

“It was a miscalculation,” she said. “I thought it would be better to do it in the morning because then it would be in the news all day … But there was no media.”

“It is really a shame that that image of a woman resisting and fighting the power and the order without shame didn’t make it.”