‘Canada’s Trump’ was misnomer
No one in Tory race really fit the definition
Whoever walks away Saturday ni ght as the Conservative Party of Canada’s new leader, it will not be Canada’s version of Donald Trump. That’s not because Kellie Leitch’s values- testing-for- immigrants campaign never r eally caught on, and it’s not because Kevin O’Leary dropped out of the race when it became clear he couldn’t win it. It’s because despite scores of news articles and columns over the past year considering the potential for “Canada’s own Donald Trump,” there was no one in the race who usefully fit that definition. To the extent history takes interest in this race, I hope it will draw some useful insights from the flimsy narrative that took hold.
Let’s start with O’Leary. Like Trump, he’s a rich, brash, say- anything know-nothing ( though vastly less rich than Trump), and he’s been on TV. That’s not nothing, but since everything else was different it wasn’t at all compelling. O’Leary rejected the comparisons: “I am certainly not Donald Trump in policy — foreign policy or domestic or social,” he told The Associated Press. He was occasionally daffy, but never extreme — and often downright liberal. He praised the CBC; he was all for legalizing marijuana; he disparaged the fighting of wars and pooh- poohed the threat ISIL poses to Canada. Many wondered why “Canada’s Donald Trump” wanted to lead a conservative party at all.
Leitch famously enthused at Trump’s victory, hailing it as an “exciting message that needs to be delivered in Canada as well.” So she at least wanted to be associated with Trumpism — but that didn’t obligate the media to help her out. On paper her campaign was nothing but meat- and- potatoes blue Toryism — cut spending, no carbon tax, gun rights, a strong military — with a few populist flourishes like legalizing pepper spray for self-defence and, most notably, the aforementioned “values-testing.”
That was supposed to be the Trumpian hook. The idea seemed to be impractical, unnecessary, probably mostly useless and designed mainly to elicit freakedout responses from liberals — but it was by no means objectively extreme. We already make i mmigrants read a citizenship guide refers to Canadian “values” 10 times, and then we test them on it. Compared to Trump’s absolute ban on Muslims entering United States, Leitch was practically laying out a welcome mat.
You could perhaps defend portraying Leitch as “Canada’s Trump” on grounds that she advocated more extreme policies than her party or the country were used to. Or you could if Leitch herself had not cofronted the “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line, back when everyone was sure Trump couldn’t even win the GOP nomination. Or you could had the Tories not run their last campaign insisting people unveil while taking the citizenship ceremony — not to identify themselves, but in adherence to some hitherto unknown principle.
“People … don’ t want their co-citizens to be terrorists,” Immigration Minister Chris Alexander — also a leadership candidate — told Vice’s Justin Ling. “They don’t want people to become citizens who haven’t respected the rules.”
If that i nterview happened today, people would call it Trumpian. In fact it’s pure, homespun Canadiana: like every country, Canada has nativists and it has open- borders types. We are not special. But the Trump comparisons are just a symptom of a disease that allows many of us to pretend we are: the constant need among Canadian l i berals to ascribe any political phenomenon they perceive as negative to American influences.
Canadians love to compare themselves to Americans, for all kinds of reasons — to congratulate themselves, to flagellate themselves, to comfort themselves when they’re somewhat embarrassed. The “meanwhile in Canada” genre of tweets is a bit of all three: in the midst of chaos i n Washington, someone will oh- so- cleverly take note of a comparatively minor Canadian scandal. There is no charitable interpretation to be made of it: it’s either bragging, or it’s suggesting that we worry too much about Canada’s ostensibly piddling scandals — like, say, the prime minister’s chief of staff cutting a $ 90,000 cheque to a sitting senator. That’s not Watergate, but it’s bonkers nonetheless.
The effect is both to confuse the conversation about any given issue and to absolve Canadians of any responsibility for i t. The ultimate example was CBC Marketplace’s moronic attempt to sell racist T-shirts on Canadian streets and chalk up any interest to “the Trump effect.” But again, that was just an extreme manifestation of this unhealthy blame- America instinct — one we would do well to eradicate.