Anti-trudeau protests ugly, but not surprising
Scenes from the Liberal campaign trail are causing alarm. At an event in Waterloo, Ont., protesters unfurled a poster depicting Justin Trudeau about to be hanged for “high treason.” Racist and misogynist slurs run thick and fast, journalists have reported. Several have seemed particularly struck by mothers with toddlers hurling insults and obscenities at Trudeau.
Campaign protests are nothing new, but veteran reporters say these are angrier this time around than in recent memory. Surely, though, that’s unsurprising. Over the last 18 months, your average Canadian has had a lot more to be angry about than in recent memory. Most of it wasn’t the federal government’s fault, if it was anyone’s, but if the federal government is going to call an election solely on behalf of the prime minister’s ego, then it should expect an earful.
In a few months Trudeau has gone from opposing mandatory vaccination to attend Toronto Raptors games to promising to ban the unvaccinated from airplanes and trains and accusing them of endangering the nation’s children. He’s unambiguously pitting a significant chunk of the Canadian population against the majority for political gain, and ginning up back-to-school fears, while promising to meet “anger with compassion.” It’s fundamentally disreputable.
Liberals may struggle to believe it, but not all the vaccine-hesitant are nutters and sociopaths. Notably, a Leger poll for the Association for Canadian Studies, conducted July 2-4, found 23 per cent of parents felt it was not safe to vaccinate children aged 12-17, and an additional 17 per cent weren’t sure. That’s hardly surprising, given COVID-19’S relative benignity to children (for now) and modern parents’ generally cautious nature. Basic political wisdom would advise against sneering at 40 per cent of Canadian parents.
What seems most novel in the protests is the wayout-in-left-field faction. Conspiracy-minded Canadians who lived in fear of Stephen Harper’s “hidden agenda” generally feared things that could at least conceivably occur: rolling back abortion rights, say. The anti-liberal constituencies who believe that Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son or that he’s part of George Soros’s diabolical international child trafficking scheme are operating on an entirely different plane of unreality.
In a lot of other ways, however, all this anger isn’t really novel at all. As Tristin Hopper noted in the National Post earlier this week, Brian Mulroney faced the same mob scenes, hangings in effigy and treason charges during the free trade, GST and Meech Lake battles. It was just a somewhat different crowd: A Toronto Star reporter on the 1988 campaign trail described a group of protesters in downtown Saskatoon as consisting “mostly (of) elderly people, classical musicians and academics.”
“I would like to give (Mulroney) a good kick in the ass,” one told her.
Indeed, the tradition goes back at least 130 years. Liberal policy vis-à-vis the United States “has been commercial union, unrestricted reciprocity, and latterly, tariff reform,” John A. Macdonald told Toronto’s arch-tory Albany Club during the 1891 campaign. “But there is another name by which it must be known, and that is annexation — which is treason.”
The idea of “locking up” political opponents for their misdeeds, figuratively or literally, was also pretty routine before Donald Trump’s supporters started using it against Hillary Clinton. In 2012, on behalf of the Public Sector Alliance of Canada, Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan presided over a mass trial of Harper, then Ontario premier Dalton Mcguinty, Ontario opposition leader Tim Hudak and Toronto mayor Rob Ford for having “shipped jobs offshore, eliminated jobs and driven down wages.”
They were found guilty. “In another time and another place these four individuals would be hauled onto the public square and they would be publicly flogged,” said Ryan.
“Harper — If you can’t join him, beat him!” the Vancouver Media Co-op suggested in April 2015. They meant literally head down to English Bay and whack an effigy of the prime minister to pieces, then set the pieces on fire.
These events did not produce the sort of handwringing we are seeing now. And if that were simply a belated realization that overheated rhetoric and imagery can push fragile and disturbed people into violence, that would be a good thing. But it’s clearly not just that.
Selective outrage is everywhere. Here in Toronto, anti-vaccine-passport protesters have targeted businesses that support them. At three Little Italy establishments in particular, patio diners have been treated to a never-ending din of chanting, banging pots and pans and occasional confrontations. Police have attended but done next to nothing; calling the protest “peaceful.”
This has exasperated many Torontonians, as has the sight of police officers escorting anti-mask and anti-lockdown marchers around town — even when such gatherings were illegal under pandemic rules. But woe betide anyone who complained last summer that Black Lives Matter marches went ahead unmolested, even as various government goons were handing out fines for having a barbecue in a park.
When asked about that contradiction, Patrick Brown, mayor of Brampton, Ont., said “we have an appreciation and respect for this moment in our history and need to listen and learn.” He was right. But that’s what the anti-vaccine, anti-mask and anti-lockdown skeptics think of their own causes, and no one is likely to change their minds. Evidence from other jurisdictions does suggest vaccine passports — such as Ontario announced on Wednesday — might knock some of them grudgingly into the vaccinated camp. Calling them deplorables and enemies of society is very unlikely to speed that process along.