Amidst shouts of “George Bush, war criminal” and shoe-throwing at a portrait of the former president, a faction of the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War set up a quieter protest option across the street from the Convention Centre. No chants, just painting for a Toronto Peace Mural.

The War Resisters Support Campaign painted a couple large sheets of plywood white to serve as a free-standing canvas and invited protesters to flex a little creative muscle. Jamine Aponte is with the campaign and helped to organize the protest alongside the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War. The support campaign is there to help men and women who have sought refuge in Canada rather than fight in Iraq. Aponte thinks that one of the most important things we can do is ban together to show support .

“We need to keep our current politicians accountable for their actions,’ Aponte said. “Stephen Harper is ignoring legislation that’s been passed to let people like war resisters stay in Canada … that’s the best thing we can do.”

For the mural, Aponte wanted to portray a peaceful aspect of the protest.

“(We need to) display a positive message,” she said. “We can’t always be pumping our fists. We also need to look ahead and look towards a brighter future.”

Jamie Holcouv painted traditional still life fruit in the bottom corner of the mural. She hails from Tennessee and had already served two tours in Iraq before she moved to Toronto with her partner two years ago. As she added definition to the grapes and pineapple on her artistic contribution, she mentioned that it was primarily the unwillingness of her commanding officers to answer questions she had on the mission profiles that really prompted her to join the war resisters.

“We ran strike missions and would just bomb areas of land that were supposedly uninhabited,” Holcouv said. “But sometimes we were operating on intelligence that was months old.”

On port calls in the United Arab Emirates, Holcouv said they spoke with some Iraqi refugees and was surprised to connect more with them than with those commanding officers who couldn’t answer her questions about why they had to be there.

“These are people who have lost their homes and everything they own and members of their familes,” she said. “It just seemed we had more in common speaking with them than with the people we were working for who were profiting from (our work.)”

Though she misses the mountains of Tennessee, Holcouv and her boyfriend, also a resister, plan to remain in Toronto for the foreseeable future.