Let’s hope this darkness doesn’t cross the border
Canada has done everything it can to seal itself off from the havoc that Donald Trump created in his country during the pandemic.
But the damage that
Trump has done to democracy, culminating in the surreal, mob scene at Capitol Hill on Wednesday, is a contagion that needs more than border closings to contain. Sore losers, once sad outliers in the world of politics, have been empowered by an outgoing, impeached, one-term president. Democracy deniers have stampeded right from the fringe to the centre of power in Washington.
Canada has never been immune nor a mere spectator to big, reality-shaking events in the United States. The storming of Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, will soon join those incidents in infamy, for the U.S. and this country, too.
“Remember this day forever,” Trump said on Twitter as the curfew was descending on Washington Wednesday. His words were not, unfortunately, accompanied by another saying of leaders in turbulent, violent times: “Never again.”
In case any Canadians are feeling smug about our own motto of “peace, order and good government” in the wake of Wednesday’s events in Washington, it is worth remembering that it was only seven months ago that a man with a truck full of weapons stormed the gates of Rideau Hall in Ottawa, looking for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The man, Corey Hurren, was a Canadian Forces reservist with links to farright conspiracy theories — the kind that had been spouted on Parliament Hill a day before at a “Canadian Revolution” rally where some participants were calling for the arrest of Trudeau and waving signs calling for “a Canadian Trump.”
This was how Canada Day was celebrated on Parliament Hill in the horrible year that was 2020. Hurren’s case is still winding its way through the courts and in our careful, Canadian way, we are not drawing big lines between this isolated event and all the darker politics peeking at us from across the border.
But the events in Washington this week are a chilling look into what happens when one fringe dissident becomes an empowered mob.
Let’s also not forget that our legislatures have been staging grounds for violence as well. In 1984, an armed man killed three and injured more than a dozen people when he walked into
Quebec’s National Assembly, looking for politicians to kill.
In 2014, Canada’s Parliament was plunged into mayhem when a lone gunman stormed in Centre Block after shooting and killing a soldier at the War Memorial a block away. The trauma of that day is still felt by many people who were in Ottawa’s halls of democracy that October morning.
One can only imagine how many searing memories were being created on Capitol Hill on Wednesday by a mob much larger and less easily dispatched than one, solo gunman. Trump’s supporters aren’t the only ones who will “remember this day forever.”
What was on display in Washington on Wednesday was the logical, violent result of political polarization — a force that Trump has cultivated and exploited to woo the Republican “base.” The United States has become a place where plain, democratic facts — such as who won an election and who lost — is a matter of opinion.
Polarization in Canada has not yet reached this stage of denial or violence. Nor does this country have a Trumplike figure, willing to shamelessly and dangerously whip up these forces to the level seen in that country in the waning days of his presidency.
Some day in the future, students and experts in Canada-U.S. relations will study the Trump era and argue over whether these years drove more divisions than we’ve ever seen before between these two neighbours.
COVID-19 will be held up as an example and illustration of how the two nations went two different ways, up to and including the shutting-down of the border for a historic length of time — approaching 10 months and no end in immediate sight.
Whatever Trump did during the pandemic, Canada’s government went out of its way to do the opposite — listening to science, building bridges (for a while) across partisan lines. Canadians looked south and realized that our government, our health-care system, really was superior to Trump’s America.
It is not clear yet, though, that Canada has found a way to isolate itself from the kind of politics that Trump helped to unleash into a full-fledged assault on U.S. democracy on Jan. 6, 2021. That’s a virus that should still be keeping Canada on high, defensive alert, even after Trump is gone.