Small, fervent group of Canadians rallying behind Trump
The line of cars snaked through downtown, large Donald Trump and “Stop the Steal” flags protruding from their windows.
The motorized rally last Wednesday was in some ways a familiar sight in this season of endless dispute over the U.S. presidential election. As it unfolded, protestors egged on by President Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington.
But the vehicular demonstration didn’t take place anywhere in the United States. The pro-Trump event traversed downtown Toronto, as other fans of the U.S. president held similar gatherings in Vancouver, Calgary and Red Deer, Alta.
And some Canadians actually made the trip to Washington, one describing on video his interactions with police outside the Capitol, the wider confrontation there triggering Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment on Wednesday.
Polls indicate that few people in this country think much of the hugely controversial U.S. leader.
But his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud have propelled a small coterie of Canadians to voice their loyalty in surprisingly visible ways.
“He is a true hero,” said Nasser Pooli, the IranianCanadian activist who organized the Toronto rally. “The whole world is behind Donald Trump ... He stands with people, not with the government, not with the media — they lie to your face.”
Pooli’s Canada for Trump Facebook page is full of Trump accolades.
“We’ll take him in Canada for 4 years,” says Dan Morgan of Maple Ridge, B.C. “The swamp here is brimming and needs a loooong deep drain!”
One poster on the page, identifying herself only as “Yisrael Canada,” said she had travelled to Texas to rally for the president, and posted photographs of a woman at a Trump rally holding a sign with a Canadian flag. Yisrael Canada’s own Facebook timeline also contains crudely anti-Semitic memes and posts promoting conspiracy theories about COVID-19, vaccines, the 9-11 attacks and the U.S. election.
Political scientist Paul J. Quirk sees public expressions of Trump fealty here as an offshoot of a broader phenomenon: Canada’s obsession with the drama surrounding a norm-shattering president.
“Canadians see so much news about the U.S. that many become vicarious participants in American politics,” said Quirk, a professor and U.S. specialist at the University of British Columbia.
“Trump has become a symbolic figure, standing for a constellation of attitudes ... opposition to immigration, resentment of racial and ethnic diversity, hostility toward political and cultural elites,” he added. “Coming out to a protest march in Trump regalia is a way of thumbing one’s nose at all of the major Canadian political parties.”
In the U.S., politicians across the partisan divide have condemned the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in encouraging the crowd. Several Republican lawmakers voted to impeach the president, while others have called for his resignation.
The most striking manifestation of Canadian support for the president, and an illustration of the movement’s overlapping causes, was the appearance by two Ontario nurses at that Washington rally.
Kristen Nagle and Sarah Choujounian were in D.C. primarily to take part in a public event by a group called Global Frontline Nurses. It opposes mask-wearing and other COVID-19 public health measures, and generally accuses the health-care system of “corruption” around the pandemic. They made their way afterward to the besieged Capitol
Choujounian and American colleague Erin Marie Olszewski live streamed their tour around the outside of the building, describing the crowd of hundreds as largely peaceful, but also like “a revolution.”