National Post (National Edition)
... MEANWHILE, UNDER CANADA’S CONSERVATIVE MICROSCOPE ...
Is Kellie Leitch for real? Richard Warnica spoke to dozens of the Conservative leadership candidate’s supporters and detractors to find out
PART I: THREE PINS
Imagine for a second that everything wild that’s happened in politics over the past several years — all the madness from Trump to Brexit and even Rob Ford — could be broken down into three points: pushpins, if you like, punched into a corkboard in a triangle pattern. Those pins have always existed in politics — call them the message, the messenger and the audience. That much hasn’t changed. What’s warped somehow is the relationship between them.
There was a time, not long ago, when there were bounds in politics. The pushpins were connected by string. You could trace the path from messenger down to message across to audience and back up again. The pins existed, in other words, in defined relation to each other. If you pulled any one too far from the others the whole thing would break.
What that meant in a practical sense was that, to succeed, politicians had to sell things that seemed, at least on some level, authentic to who they were. They couldn’t pull the message too far from the messenger and still reach an audience. The two had to seem connected for people to buy in.
Politics doesn’t seem to work that way anymore. Today, that string has become an elastic band. The ties are still there, but they are stretching. The pins are all over the board, and the old ideas of who can sell what to whom are slipping away.
Today, a rich kid screw-up with a drinking problem can sell a city on fiscal prudence and hard work. A billionaire grifter with a son named Barron can become the champion of the forgotten working class. And right now, in Canada, a consummate political insider—a woman who has spent her entire adult life chasing conventional political success — can build a campaign against “insiders” and the “elite.”
All of which helps explains, why, on the first Tuesday of 2017, as the Conservative Party leadership race trudged into its third calendar year, Kellie Leitch, MD, MBA, and veteran of almost four decades of insider conservative work, appeared on a Fox Business Network segment titled “The Global Trump Effect.”
Leitch is no natural on camera. She struggles with banter and has a curious affect, a way of seeming to process questions almost physically before steering her answers roughly back to her message track. The “elites,” Leitch — who once ran two university programs at once — told the host, are “out of touch with the average Canadian.” Along with the “insiders” and the “left wing media” they are “pushing their open border, globalist agenda.”
It was, in many respects, a remarkable address. Had it appeared in isolation it might have been enough to cause several dozen Conservative heads to explode. But for Leitch, it was only the latest in a long series of deliberately provocative gambits. In the last five months, Leitch has promised to test immigrants and refugees for “anti-Canadian values.” She has praised Donald Trump’s victory and aped his campaign messaging, with vows to “drain the Canal” — an allusion to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. She has, after a lifetime of working within conservative parties, decided that “insiders” are a bad thing.
Along the way, Leitch has succeeded, if nothing else, in shaping the public conversation around the Conservative leadership race. In a long, low profile campaign, absent — until the recent entry of Kevin O’Leary — any big names, Leitch has dominated media coverage. She has made the race, on a certain level, a referendum on herself and on her ideas. In the process she has enraged and baffled some party veterans. She has alienated friends and colleagues who have known her for decades and emboldened an anti-Muslim, antiimmigrant fringe within her own party.
And she’s done it all because of those pins.
Leitch’s entire campaign is a wager. It’s a gamble on elasticity. She is banking, with every dogwhistle statement, every Trump allusion and anti-elite jibe, on the idea that the link between messenger and message in politics is so loose now it might as well not exist. She’s trusting that in 2017, anyone can sell anything. History doesn’t matter. Background doesn’t matter. Authenticity is dead. It’s a hell of a bet. For Leitch, it means putting at stake the very public idea of herself. Even if she succeeds she will be forever branded by this campaign. She will always be known as the one who opened that door in Canadian politics. And she’s risking all of that, one has to assume, because she thinks it can work. And that’s where things get really interesting.
Leitch’s advisers aren’t stupid. If they have her preaching Canadian values and immigrant screening, it’s because they think that message can land. They believe there is an audience for her Trump-light shtick, the same audience, on a different scale, in a different country, that came out for Trump’s inauguration last week, the audience that stunned the Republican Party, the United States, and the entire world last year.
If they’re right about that, then Canadian politics are about to change no matter what happens with Leitch’s campaign. Because that would mean that the same forces that reshaped American politics and British politics, that have taken over Hungary and moved into France and Holland and half of Europe are not just active here, but ascendant.
That means the most important question in Canadian politics right now — the one that has the most potential to disrupt how this country looks and feels and governs itself for the next generation— is this:
When Kellie Leitch speaks, who’s listening, and what do they hear?
II: REVENGE OF THE COMMENT SECTION
Don Link grew up Calgary in the 1960s, just northeast of the city’s core. He had a great childhood there, he said. But he’s 60 now, and he’s worried his nieces and nephews won’t have the same opportunities that he did. “I see things changing in Canada for the worse,” he said recently from his current home on Vancouver Island. “I envision — looking at what’s happening in Europe at the moment, in Germany, France, Belgium, England — that Canada is going in the same direction.”
Link is worried about many things, but chief among them are Muslims and Muslim immigration. He holds views on Islam that are, by any definition, extreme. He thinks Canadian Muslims are trying to impose Shariah law in Canada. “It’s happening already,” he said. His Facebook page is littered with references to the “Caliphate Broadcasting Company” — what he calls the CBC — and to the “Prime Mohammedan” — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At the top of his page, behind his profile picture, is a large image of Kellie Leitch.
At the end of November, Leitch released a statement on her Facebook page branding her campaign The Revenge of the Comment Section. “Are you tired of being ignored or mocked by the Liberal and media elites?” she wrote. “It’s time to say ‘enough’ to this condescending, elitist sarcasm.” Her supporters, Link included, lapped it up. “We need to take this country back from this liberal globalization,” wrote one user, who posted under the name Brendon Irwin. “Just like our brothers and sisters did in the U.S.A.”
Leitch fans online — her personal comment section — run a pretty wide gamut. But talk to enough of them and themes do emerge. As an experience, it’s not dissimilar from talking to Trump supporters last year in places like West Virginia, New Hampshire and Ohio. There’s a core distrust for the mainstream media and a dislike of the politically correct. Fears about immigration and refugees pop up a lot, along with horror stories, often dubiously sourced, about Muslim refugees in Europe.
As much as anything, what you get from talking to Leitch supporters is a loose sense that she can refocus the country inward somehow, away from refugees or international aid and back toward something that may have never existed at all. “I thought, well, this is the lady that’s going to represent what Stephen Harper used to call the Old Stock Canadians, the ones that have been here for a while,” said Shellie Correia, a Leitch fan who lives just outside of Welland, Ont. “And I think that’s important. Because you don’t want new people coming in thinking they have special rights and that they will be catered to over the people who have been here all along.”
That feeling manifests itself in different ways. But it comes off in general as a preference for Canada — and a very particular idea of Canadians — first. “I see homeless people or poor people in Alberta, people affected by the economy,” said Devon Mannix, a 19-year-old Leitch supporter in Fort McMurray. “All those hundreds of millions of dollars that go to Syrian refugees, I feel like those could go to helping (them) instead.”
In person, Leitch tends to be very guarded in what she says. She rarely diverts from her message track and will find a way to yank most questions back to a short list of talking points: about Canada having a core identity, or on face-to-face interviews for potential immigrants and refugees. Somewhat paradoxically, that has earned her a reputation among her fans as a free-speaking enemy of the politically correct. They bring it up all the time.
“Nobody knows, basically, how to speak their mind anymore,” said Wally Fitzpatrick, a Leitch supporter in Newfoundland. “There’s too many feelings out there to be hurt ... You gotta bite your tongue. You can’t say Merry Christmas, for God’s sake.” Leitch, he believes, is different. “I find, boy, she speaks her mind.”
That reputation likely comes less from what Leitch says than for what people — supporters and detractors — assume she’s hinting at. Don Link was initially attracted to Leitch because of her plan to screen immigrants, refugees and visitors to Canada for “anti-Canadian values.” He believes that what she really means is screening for Muslims. “The biggest thing that drew me to her is her understanding — I think it’s her understanding anyway — of the threat of political Islam to Canada, " he said.
Link isn’t bothered by the fact that Leitch herself doesn’t talk about Muslim immigrants or refugees specifically. He thinks she’s just trying to avoid a backlash from the liberal media and the politically correct. “I know she understands that Canadian values are under threat and to me that (Muslim immigration) is one of the biggest threats,” he said.
Link isn’t alone among Leitch supporters in feeling that way. In fact, most of those interviewed for this story brought up Islam or Muslim immigrants without prompting. “My biggest beef is with the invasion,” said Fitzpatrick. “I call it an invasion from the Middle East...We had one small mosque in St. John’s and now there’s two in there and they’re blocked. They’re absolutely blocked. They’re coming in and nobody knows.”
OUR COUNTRY WAS BUILT ON A CERTAIN VALUE SET.