When they started out they thought they'd be a one-day stand at an anti-uranium rally in front of the BC legislature, but now they have so many requests to appear that they can't fill them all. They're street theatre, they're funny, they're dead serious, they're angry, they're raging, they want nuclear weapons and everything that contributes to their manufacture out of Canada, they want a clean world for their children and their children's children, they're Raging Grannies.
The Raging Granny "movement" started in Victoria, BC, and has since spread to the islands. The Gabriola Island group are not all grannies; two of the eight are "just plain mothers" who hope they'll get the chance to be grannies. The first Raging Granny conference, held in August 1988 on Saltspring Island, had representatives from Victoria, Vancouver, Gabriola, Comox, and Saltspring. A group of younger women in Parksville have formed a group called the "Cleaning Ladies," who are planning to clean up the world.
They sing outrageous songs to familiar tunes, dress in outlandish costumes and relentlessly protest the presence of American warships and submarines armed with nuclear weapons in our waters, the presence of a nuclear weapons guidance system on Winchelsea Island off Nanoose, the continuing and intensifying involvement of Canada in a military strategy they believe is wrong. And they have more work than they can handle.
