LOATHING THE LIBS
These are the people upset at Liberal leader
Angry crowds like this one in Bolton, Ont., are dogging Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's election campaign, but the vitriol may backfire on them by earning the party some sympathy. `It's helping us big time,' says one MP.
W.C. Fields once said he never voted for anyone: “I always vote against.”
That seems to be a fair summation of the protests dogging the Liberal campaign. There is volcanic anger, even loathing.
But most protesters do not seem to be partisan — which is too bad for the Liberals, who would love to connect the worst excesses of the protests to Erin O'Toole's campaign.
Politicizing mandatory vaccination has been an election tactic for the Liberals since the first day of the campaign.
But Trudeau looks set to benefit in other ways — being the subject of noxious abuse is bringing out the sympathy vote.
“It's helping us big time,” said one Liberal MP. “On the doorsteps people are telling me, `We don't like what happened and we support the PM.' ”
Having witnessed the fury first hand in Nobleton and Bolton in Ontario last Friday, I tried to get a sense of who might be so angry with Trudeau that they are comfortable with intimidation in our electoral process.
The Canadian Press reported over the weekend that a Facebook page under the name Ontario Protests and Freedom to Assemble was being used mobilize the protests.
There was clearly some co-ordination. But it directed, rather than created, an organic outpouring of rage.
After a column on Friday night, I argued a “crackpot fringe” was responsible — a descriptor that provoked a barrage of abuse directed at me and the Liberal leader. Dan Pomerleau sent an email from Calgary: “Some of Trudeau's (semen) is sticking to your chin.” Helpfully, he supplied his phone number, so I called him.
Why would you send a complete stranger such a vile email, I asked? “I didn't like your pro-Trudeau position. You seem to be very anti people protesting violently against him. I think they are doing everyone a favour — he's the most divisive mother **** er who laced a pair of shoes.
“I don't like what's going on — everyone's a victim who doesn't like the country and so the country needs to change. This is not the same country I grew up in.”
Pomerleau said he has been double-vaccinated but thinks everyone should be entitled to do what they want. He said he will probably vote for the Maverick Party. “It's a wasted vote but I'm not going to vote for O'Toole, who is far left-ofcentre.”
Those were common themes in many other conversations and emails.
Jim Jones from Calgary said he fears Trudeau will destroy the country with his “billion of dollars of gifts” during the campaign and “great green policy.”
There are echoes of Trumpism in the current protests — mainly men from the ethnic majority who feel like strangers in their own country, abandoned by progressive values they don't understand or share.
But there is a new, added ingredient to the current witches' brew that brings in a broader cross-section of society, including many more women — vaccination policy.
Tammy Kzyski said she voted Liberal in the last election but believes Trudeau has divided the country by race, sex and now vaccines. “Nobody assaulted Trudeau (in Bolton). He shouldn't be such a baby. If he wants to ban 20 per cent of the Canadian public from society, he should have to face those Canadian citizens,” she said.
Siegfrid Mast from Prince Edward Island said he voted for Trudeau in the past two elections but won't this time around. “People are not angry about getting the vaccine, they are angry at how the pandemic is being handled,” he said. “Mistrust stems from the manipulation of people. The unvaccinated are not allowed to travel, to eat in restaurants and not allowed to attend public events, while the vaccinated enjoy these simple pleasures. Then we are expected to believe that proof of a vaccine will protect everyone from spreading the virus. But the virus does not care if you are vaccinated or not.”
Stuart McDougall in West Vancouver said we have never seen this level of anger in an election campaign because we have never seen Canadian citizens “denied their most basic rights, liberties and freedoms.”
Brooke Simpson from Brockville, Ont., said a vaccine passport would violate freedoms like the right to personal health information privacy. “When I see vaccinated people losing their minds when the unvaccinated get out and about living their lives, because they think the unvaccinated are dangerous, my question is: `If you are vaccinated, why are you worried?' An un-vaxxed person is at more risk sitting near a vaccinated person than the other way around.”
I still think the protesters I saw on Friday are a crackpot fringe. Masks don't give you Legionnaires' disease, as one woman maintained in Nobleton.
But the degree of loathing for Trudeau extends beyond the frothing army of conspiracy theorists.
These are complicated issues around personal freedoms — something the Liberal leader has glossed over.
It is in Trudeau's interests to pick and choose the rights he is prepared to defend — something he said he would never do when he settled the Omar Khadr case. At the time, he said: “The measure of a society — a just society — is not whether we stand up for people's rights when it is easy or popular to do so, but whether we recognize rights when it is difficult, when it is unpopular.”
The problem with making such sanctimonious statements is that they come back to bite you when you don't live up to them. The Liberal leader has shown no sensitivity to the belief common
THE REFUSAL TO GET VACCINATED ENDANGERS THOSE THAT CANNOT BE INOCULATED — INCLUDING EVERYONE UNDER 12.
among many Canadians that their Charter rights are being infringed.
In this case, I think vaccine passports are a defensible infringement on the rights of a minority in the interest of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
It is not like the right of some Cajun to ignore an evacuation order as Hurricane Ida bears down. The refusal to get vaccinated endangers those that cannot be inoculated — including everyone under the age of 12.
It is dangerous to ignore such resentment. But I suspect it will not cost the Liberal leader — and it may even have arrested O'Toole's momentum. As my friend Pomerleau pointed out, the disaffected don't see the Conservative leader as their salvation. The man to watch may well be Maxime Bernier, whose People's Party is the very definition of W.C. Fields maxim — a vote against.