Redirect Bill Dennis’s salary: One Indigenous mural per month for Sarnia

Recently, Sarnia City Councillor Bill Dennis posted a meme of Rosa Parks with a caption that read Fuck Your Rules. This was a calculated act of spectacle.

Recently, Sarnia City Councillor Bill Dennis posted a meme of Rosa Parks with a caption that read Fuck Your Rules. This was a calculated act of spectacle. It was a hijacking of a Black revolutionary icon to shield a position of settler-colonial entitlement.

To take a woman who stood against the crushing weight of Jim Crow and use her image to defend a right to be dismissive toward Indigenous art is a profound failure of leadership. Bill Dennis is playing a familiar, tired game of Trump-style politics. He is publicly announcing a run for Mayor and then immediately pivoting to outbursts designed to embolden a base through rage-baiting.

He uses the Chemical Valley as a shield to distract from his own conduct. He turns every council meeting into a campaign rally designed to trend in the news. Council seems confused about how to handle this.

As adrienne maree brown teaches us, What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. If we allow local leaders to practice a politics of intimidation and the dismissal of Treaty rights, we are reinforcing a carceral logic that operates on a global stage. That said, we cannot talk about freedom in Sarnia while ignoring the reality that no one is free until Palestine is free.

For those who feel this is a distant issue, look closer. Gaza is a narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean coast, home to more than two million Palestinians who have lived for decades under a blockade that human rights organizations and activists have described as the world’s largest open-air prison or concentration camp. We are witnessing a transnational struggle where 8 billion people are watching a systemic erasure of life and land there, a place where the very right to exist is being dismantled by the same colonial frameworks we benefit from here.

The liberation of the oppressed is a singular, global thread. Bill's defiance is just a smaller, pettier version of that same systemic arrogance. Closer to home, the Aamjiwnaang, Kettle and Stony Point, and Walpole Island First Nations, communities bound by Treaty 29 and generations of connection to these lands, have been oppressed by the industrial shadow of Chemical Valley, Canada’s largest concentration of petrochemical plants, for over a century.

These nations are literally surrounded by refineries and chemical facilities that have turned their traditional territories into one of the most polluted regions in the country, contaminating air, water, soil, and health for entire lifetimes. This community has lived under this toxic shadow for their entire existence.

They are still waiting on full transparency and results from the latest Suncor oil spill into the St. Clair River just weeks ago, with leaders still in the dark about the spill’s size, cause, and remediation plans. Meanwhile, the INEOS Styrolution plant, long a flashpoint over toxic benzene emissions and community health, has now permanently closed after more than 80 years of operation, leaving behind significant environmental damage and unresolved contamination.

Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, in particular, continues to navigate the long shadow of colonial land theft; even after the historic Ipperwash standoff and partial returns of seized territory from the Ontario government, full recognition and control of their traditional lands remains an ongoing struggle. To dismiss their art and their leaders while they navigate these layered environmental and colonial injustices is not just insensitive. It is pathetic.

May I suggest a way forward?

Bill Dennis collects a taxpayer-funded salary as a councillor that could pay for a new Indigenous art piece every single month. Since he clearly views a $5,000 mural as an offensive expense, let’s find a better use for his paycheque.

I suggest to Council a non-violent way of resisting this spectacle. We should treat his salary as a compensatory fund. Every month, we should redirect those tax dollars to commission a local artist for a new Indigenous mural.

We could have a new piece of history, culture, and beauty appearing across Sarnia for every month left in his term. I am certain that a single piece of art in this city has already provided more beauty, goodness, and truth to Sarnia than any word or policy Bill Dennis has ever backed.

This would be a move toward actual restoration rather than the performative rage Dennis relies on. The act is exhausted. The city is tired of the strategic spectacle and the deflection. There is a world moving past this brand of politics, and it requires a level of self-reflection that Bill doesn't seem capable of.