Far-right figures should be challenged
Faith Goldy got 25,667 votes on election day, despite not being covered in mainstream
Faith Goldy and her thousands of altright, nationalist, white supremacist supporters in Toronto and abroad must have felt like winners on municipal election night.
Yes, John Tory was re-elected mayor as predicted and Jennifer Keesmaat finished a distant second with 24 per cent of the votes. But, in a field of 35 candidates for mayor, Goldy easily topped the rest.
The final vote tally shows 25,667 Torontonians voted for Goldy — a virtual unknown until she crashed mayoral debates she wasn’t invited to participate in and Premier Doug Ford posed with her and her supporters and then for days refused to distance himself from her.
You’d be missing the point if you are complacent about the fact that only 3.4 per cent of voters opted for the ethnonationalist considered too toxic for a far-right media site where she was a star of the unabashedly pro-white movement. Rebel Media fired her after she appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast.
Since before the turn of the century, avowed white supremacist Don Andrews has been the standard-bearer for that kind of odious platform in Toronto’s municipal elections. Andrews’ practice was to register and not campaign.
JAMES continued on GT7
In the 2003, 2010 and 2014 elections, Andrews’ poll numbers went from 1,220 votes to 1,012, about one-tenth of 1 per cent of voters — truly fringe.
By comparison, Goldy received more than 1,000 votes in each of 12 of the 25 city wards last month. In Ward 1, territory of the Ford dynasty, where the MPP is the premier of Ontario — the same Premier Doug Ford who was photographed with Goldy at his annual Ford Fest — Goldy got 1,098 votes.
Goldy’s highest support came in the leafy south-central sections of Etobicoke. She received 2,077 votes in Ward 2 and 1,772 in Ward 3. In one Ward 2 neighbourhood, poll 60, Goldy outscored Keesmaat 24-22 and tied Keesmaat (4949) in poll number 33 of the same ward.
Unless you are an ethnonationalist, alt-right propagandist, neo-con, white supremacist, populist, anti-immigrant — you get the idea — you probably hadn’t heard of Steve Bannon before he and Donald Trump found each other and carved a path to the White House.
Unless you harbour one or more of those belief systems here in Toronto, you probably hadn’t heard about Faith Goldy until she entered the race for mayor of Toronto and demanded she be given “serious candidate” status and be included in the mayoral debates.
The moment her participation in mayoral debates became an issue, thousands more heard about her. The moment Premier Doug Ford appeared to give her tacit approval when, for three days he refused to distance himself from Goldy, tens of thousands were drawn to her.
Goldy was also politically astute in challenging decisions to ban her from debates. She hired high-profile lawyer Clayton Ruby for a legal challenge to Bell Media’s refusal to air her campaign ads. (The court ruled against her.)
All told, the controversy gave Goldy a profile she craved. That’s why opponents felt it better to silence the candidate rather than include her in civil discourse. Such opponents argue that Goldy would have received even more votes had mainstream media, election organizers and civil society allowed her to share the platform and propagate her views. That view has merit. But freedom of speech is never an easy accommodation — especially in matters of importance. Steve Bannon and Faith Goldy are cases in point.
Uncomfortable as it is, it would be a mistake to ban U.S. far-right nationalist and Trump whisperer Steve Bannon from debating conservative David Frum in Toronto. That would only heighten interest in his rhetoric and multiply the number of citizens introduced to his views, as if eating the forbidden fruit.
Better to dismantle the man’s arguments and ideas in front of everyone.
Or, at least, challenge them; declare them unwelcome, without broad appeal.
Goldy proved to be a different challenge. For one, it is impossible to decide which of the 33 “fringe candidates” should be included in an election debate.
Her platform promised to evict illegals from homeless shelters and give the shelters back to homeless Canadians, provide subsidized housing only to people born in Canada, stop illegal immigration, monitor imams and Islamic organizations to possibly revoke the permits of mosques where extreme views are taught, and reinstitute carding, the discredited police practice of routinely demanding Black and brown people answer police questions, even when they are not being investigated.
She also shares many Ford Nation views that attract the very immigrants her more controversial views target: subways over LRTs, unfriendliness towards bike lanes and traffic-calming, tough-on-crime, anti-refugee, limits on social housing, low taxes.
There’s a direct line linking the high-profile, far-right personalities and the less careful and nuanced racists who are easy to condemn. They are on the same train heading to a future that is violent, divisive and destructive. Some are near the front of the train, others are in the middle. Ignoring them has not and will not work. Censoring them destroys who we profess to be.
Confronting them and calling them out is a better strategy — especially when their utterances and policies are couched in coded words and ideas we have long deciphered as dog whistles intended to rally the likeminded under an invisible banner.
Evil grows in the dark. Open debate is a disinfectant, not something to fear.